If you opened a checking account on your phone last Tuesday at 11 PM, somewhere in the pipes there's a chance the workflow that asked for your driver's license was built in Prelim's no-code studio - on top of a core banking system older than most of its engineers.
It is a Saturday, 11:47 PM, and a small-business owner in Tampa is trying to open a checking account from her kitchen table. She picks a regional bank because the rate is better than Chase. Three things happen in the next four minutes - she takes a photo of her ID, she answers a couple of questions about her LLC, she signs. By the time her tea is cold, the account is funded. The bank's logo is everywhere in that flow. Prelim's is nowhere.
That is the whole pitch. Prelim is a white-labeled, no-code platform that sits between a customer and a bank's core - the dusty mainframe-era system that actually stores accounts and balances - and makes the experience feel like 2026 instead of 1996. The company calls it "digital account opening." Bankers call it "the thing we've been promising the board for five years."
The company was started in 2017 by Heang Chan and Chris Blaser, two product and engineering refugees from Blend. They went through Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch under the name Original Tech, rebranded, and have been quietly stitching themselves into the back of the American banking system ever since.
Prelim is not a bank. It does not want to be a bank. It does not, in the parlance of fintech twitter, "want to disrupt banking." It wants to make the banks that already exist - the community ones, the credit unions, the regionals - feel like they hired the same designers Stripe did. Which, to be fair, is its own kind of disruption. It's just the polite version.
The result, as of mid-2026, is a roster of customers that reads like a regional banking trade journal: First Republic Bank, Pacific Western Bank, City National Bank of Florida, Harbor Bank of Maryland, Colony Bank. Plus partnerships with Q2, Finastra, and Fiserv - the three companies whose software powers, by most counts, the majority of America's small banks.
We develop software used by banks to automate the business customer experience for deposit accounts, services, and loans. The journey I took was circuitous. If you're interested in a career as a founder, avoid the mistakes I've made along the way.
Prelim's product line is, on paper, deeply unglamorous - which is exactly why it works. Banks don't buy "vision." They buy things that pass an audit and shave eight minutes off an application.
Checking, savings, money market, CDs. Embedded on any website or app. Designed for the customer who closes the tab if they're asked their mother's maiden name twice.
The harder one. KYB, beneficial owners, documents, signatures. The part of banking that, until very recently, required a 45-minute branch visit and a notary on standby.
Intake and underwriting workflows for retail and commercial lending - so the same platform that opened the account can also extend credit against it.
Address changes. Product add-ons. The small requests that, multiplied across a million customers, are what actually breaks a call center.
The drag-and-drop builder bank operations teams use to change a form, add a compliance step, or wire in a new vendor without filing a JIRA ticket.
Fiserv. Finastra. Q2. Jack Henry. KYC vendors, OFAC screening, funding rails. The integration list is the moat.
Immigrated to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Thailand. Grew up in low-income housing. Worked at Wells Fargo, then Goldman Sachs, then Blend - a path that, in his own words, was "circuitous." He has talked publicly about the experience as the thing that made financial access a personal project rather than an academic one.
UC Berkeley graduate, joint Math and English. Cut his engineering teeth on CalSol - the Berkeley team that builds and races solar-powered cars across the Australian outback. Self-taught software engineer who pivoted from electric vehicles to core banking APIs, which is its own kind of endurance event.
The category is competitive - MANTL, Narmi, Alkami, Terafina, Apiture. Here is roughly where Prelim leans, based on public materials and customer mix. Not a benchmark. A vibe.
Named customers, drawn from press releases, partner directories, and the company's own materials.
Heang Chan and Chris Blaser leave Blend and join Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch.
Capital from EJF Capital, Fuel Capital, EJF Ventures, and the FIS Fintech Accelerator. Reported totals sit around $2.13M disclosed.
Live product demos at FinovateSpring 2022 and 2023 cement the brand inside the banking-tech buyer community.
Prelim ships into Q2's digital banking platform - a serious distribution channel into hundreds of mid-size banks.
Integrations with two more of the largest core providers, and ABA / Datos Insights recognition for best-in-class digital account opening.
Where to read more, watch a demo, or find the company in the wild.
It is still Saturday, 11:51 PM, in Tampa. The business owner has a new checking account. She doesn't know who Prelim is. She doesn't know about the YC batch, the CalSol solar cars, the Q2 integration, the 50+ banking systems Heang Chan's team had to learn to argue with. She knows her bank felt fast. Which, in 2026, is the entire compliment a bank can hope for - and the entire compliment Prelim is trying to deliver, one white-labeled flow at a time.