The fintech that turned cannabis banking's biggest headache - the compliance paperwork - into software, so a community bank can say "yes" without drowning in it.
The logo mark, photographed against banker's navy. A small wordmark for a company whose whole job is to make a hard-to-bank business look, on paper, like an easy one.
Cannabis occupies one of the odder positions in American finance: legal in most states, illegal federally, and therefore radioactive to the banks that would otherwise be delighted to hold the cash. Every dispensary generates real revenue and real deposits. Almost none of it has anywhere safe to go, because the moment a bank accepts it, the bank inherits a mountain of Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering obligations that a compliance officer can reasonably conclude are not worth the trouble. The rational answer, for most institutions, is "no." That "no" is the market StandardC decided to attack.
Founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Robert Mann, Richard Laiderman and Pooya Sarabandi, StandardC starts from a reframe that is almost boringly sensible: the problem with cannabis banking is not the plant, it is the paperwork. If the onboarding, the identity checks, the beneficial-ownership screening, the ongoing monitoring and - crucially - the audit trail an examiner will eventually demand can all be automated and made defensible, then the bank's "no" quietly becomes a "yes." StandardC's pitch is not that it removes the risk. It is that it makes the risk manageable enough that a small institution can take it on with a team of ordinary size.
The company's own tagline puts the value proposition in the plainest possible terms: "Same Team. 20x the Capacity." No promise to replace anyone's staff, no sweeping claims about disruption - just the suggestion that ten people can now do the work that used to need two hundred. In a corner of software where the buyer is a risk officer with a long memory and a longer list of reasons to refuse you, that restraint is closer to a feature than a slogan.
StandardC's modules carry a house naming convention - a capital C on the end of everything - and together they form a Unified Customer Management platform: apply, verify, monitor, and prove it happened.
Dynamic application and onboarding that streamlines underwriting and pulls a messy intake process into one structured flow.
KYC/KYB screening plus continuous monitoring - beneficial ownership (UBO), sanctions and real-time alerts, not point-in-time checks.
GPS-verified virtual site inspections. A bank can "visit" a dispensary without flying a compliance officer across the state.
The connective layer - task management, due diligence and examiner-ready audit logging tied into a single business record.
A data-rich digital identity that follows a company between services - think of it as a credit file for bankability.
External audit, risk assessment, policies, procedures and BSA/AML training for institutions standing up a cannabis program.
StandardC has revolutionized the way we conduct site visits.
The most telling detail on StandardC's cap table is not an investor - it is a résumé. Co-founder and Board Chair Richard Laiderman spent decades inside the machine he is now trying to reroute: head of global treasury at Visa, EVP of treasury at Bank of America, and time at Promontory Financial Group. When someone who ran treasury at Visa decides the cannabis banking problem is a data problem worth solving, banks tend to pick up the phone.
Robert Mann, CEO and co-founder, is the public voice of the mission - shifting power, as he has put it, back to individuals and small companies locked out of the system. Pooya Sarabandi, the technical co-founder, came from RMS (later Moody's), where he ran exposure-data analytics and modeling. Between them: banking credibility, product urgency and the data chops to make the compliance engine actually hold up.
Both rounds led by Hard Yaka. PitchBook pegs valuation near $17M. Figures are disclosed/estimated and approximate.
For a community bank or credit union, StandardC is the toolkit that makes a scary line of business tractable: onboard a cannabis operator through ApplyC, run the beneficial-ownership and sanctions checks through MonitorC, replace the field trip with a GPS-verified inspection in VerifyC, and hand an examiner a clean, immutable audit trail at the end. The company says its network has capacity to serve more than 1,500 cannabis-related businesses and to accept over $1.3 billion in deposits - a rough measure of the appetite it is unlocking.
For the businesses on the other side - dispensaries, and increasingly firms in lending, insurance, payroll, merchant processing and cash logistics - the promise is more mundane and more valuable: access. A portable business identity means the compliance work you did to open one account can be reused to reach loans, lines of credit and payroll, instead of starting from zero each time. StandardC first proved this on cannabis, the hardest customer, then carried the same tooling into other regulated corners where money gets stuck.
Robert Mann, Richard Laiderman and Pooya Sarabandi launch the company to solve the cannabis banking problem.
Announces a network letting banks and credit unions open accounts for cannabis businesses; closes a ~$2M seed from Hard Yaka.
Raises ~$4.75M and rolls out ApplyC and MonitorC as part of its Unified Customer Management platform.
Co-hosts a DFPI Q&A on the SAFE Banking Act and extends tooling into lending, insurance and cash logistics.
Rebrands around a privacy-first, governed AI platform: "AI Agents for Financial Institutions."
Links go to the interview and to a YouTube search for the latest product demos - specific demo URLs vary over time.
It provides compliance and risk-management software, plus advisory services, that let banks and credit unions safely serve cannabis and other high-risk, cash-intensive industries.
It was founded in 2018 by Robert Mann (CEO), Richard Laiderman (Board Chair) and Pooya Sarabandi (CTO/CPO).
ApplyC (onboarding), MonitorC (KYC/KYB screening and monitoring) and VerifyC (GPS-verified virtual site inspections), unified in one customer-management platform.
Roughly $6.8M disclosed - a ~$2M seed in 2021 and a ~$4.75M Series A in 2022, both led by Hard Yaka - with an estimated valuation near $17M.
Community banks, credit unions and specialty lenders serving cannabis-related businesses; its network reports capacity for 1,500+ CRBs and over $1.3B in deposits.
Sources: standardc.com · Crunchbase · PitchBook · PRWeb · PR Newswire · Benzinga · FinTech Futures