The fintech that lets your money out of jail. Scan a prepaid or gift card, and get real, spendable cash - by bank deposit, PayPal, Venmo, or Bitcoin - often within minutes.
Here is a fact that sounds made up but isn't: Americans are handed hundreds of billions of dollars every year in a form of money they can't quite use. Prepaid Visa cards from a rebate. A Mastercard gift card from an aunt. A promo card from a phone carrier. The balance is real - it's your money, legally - but the card can't be deposited into your bank account, isn't accepted everywhere, and quietly bleeds value through fees and forgetfulness. Some of it is spent. A shocking amount just sits in a drawer, a small monument to friction.
Prepaid2Cash is a company built entirely on closing that gap. The pitch is almost aggressively simple: you have a card with money on it, and you'd rather have the money. So you scan the card - with your phone camera, in an app - and Prepaid2Cash sends you cash. Direct deposit, instant debit transfer, PayPal, Venmo, or, if you're feeling modern, straight to a Bitcoin wallet. The transaction can settle in as little as fifteen minutes.
The mechanics matter less than the insight, which is that liquidity is itself a product. A $100 gift card you can only spend at a store you'll never visit is worth less than $100 to you. The difference between the face value and what you'd actually accept in cash today is a real number, and Prepaid2Cash operates squarely inside it. Users typically receive a discounted amount - reviews mention figures like $91 back on a $100 card - and the company keeps the spread. That's the whole business model, and it's a good one, because the behavior repeats and the supply of trapped balances never stops.
The best fintech origin stories tend to be first-person, and this one is. Co-founders Peter Vogt and John Gushman came out of finance and payments technology, which means they were exactly the kind of people who would find it personally offensive that a gift card couldn't be deposited into a checking account. They dug into the numbers, found the sprawling market of unredeemed prepaid value, and concluded - correctly - that a lot of people shared their specific annoyance. Prepaid2Cash launched its first online product in January 2016. The response was strong enough that they raised seed capital and built mobile apps for iOS and Android.
What Prepaid2Cash supports is worth a note, because it explains why the problem is hard. Plenty of services will buy a closed-loop store gift card - your Target or Nike card - at a discount. The harder, larger category is open-loop prepaid cards: the ones branded Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover that behave like debit cards but can't be deposited. Prepaid2Cash handles both, which is the technically difficult and commercially interesting part.
The entire experience is designed to remove decisions. There aren't many.
Open the app and scan your prepaid or gift card with your phone camera. Prepaid2Cash supports Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover and hundreds of store brands including Target and Nike.
Choose where the money should land - bank account, debit card, PayPal, Venmo, or a Bitcoin wallet. You see the cash value up front.
Funds can arrive in as little as 15 minutes. No mailed check with a giant fee, no waiting for the card to slowly expire in a drawer.
In July 2021, Prepaid2Cash closed a $5.1 million Series A, bringing total funding to $7.2 million.
Team size and current revenue are not publicly disclosed; figures above are drawn from company statements and press coverage and should be treated as approximate.
The founders ship their first web product in January to convert prepaid and gift cards into cash.
iOS and Android apps let users scan a card and cash out from their phones.
The company relocates from San Francisco to Innovation Depot in Alabama.
Adds crypto as a payout option and closes a Series A led by Benson Capital Partners and Relevance Ventures.
CEO Peter Vogt is accepted into the Forbes Finance Council.
Three things make Prepaid2Cash worth a second look. The first is that it handles the hard cards. Open-loop prepaid cards - the Visa-and-Mastercard-branded ones - are genuinely tricky to redeem, and building the plumbing to do it reliably is the moat.
The second is the Bitcoin detail, which is more telling than it is large. Roughly one in ten Prepaid2Cash payouts goes out as Bitcoin rather than dollars. That's not a marketing gimmick so much as a small, honest window into what a slice of users actually want when you hand them a menu of ways to receive money.
The third is geography. A card-redemption fintech that processes $25 million in a year is not the sort of thing you'd expect to find at a startup hub in Birmingham, Alabama - which is exactly why it's interesting. Prepaid2Cash left San Francisco in 2019 and built the business closer to the ground, hiring local operations and engineering talent. It's a reminder that the unglamorous, repeatable, high-frequency consumer problems don't require a coastal zip code to solve.
Product demos and interviews - search links to the company's official channels and app listings.
It converts network-branded prepaid cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) and store gift cards into cash. You scan the card in the app or online and receive funds by direct deposit, instant debit, PayPal, Venmo, or Bitcoin.
Payouts can arrive in as little as 15 minutes, depending on the payout method you choose.
Yes. Prepaid2Cash keeps a fee/spread on each redemption, so you receive a discounted cash value of the card - for example, roughly $91 on a $100 card. The company markets its rates as among the lowest in the category.
Yes. You can send the redemption value to a personal Bitcoin wallet. Roughly 10% of the company's volume goes to crypto.
It's headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, and was founded in 2016 by Peter Vogt (CEO) and John Gushman.