Torpago Quit Chasing Ramp - and Turned the Banks Into Customers

The first Torpago was built to take business away from banks. The second Torpago is built to hand it back. That reversal is the whole company in one neat, slightly mischievous sentence. Founder Brent Jackson began with a familiar fintech thesis: traditional corporate cards came with credit, but the software around them was clumsy. Employees shared cards. Finance teams chased receipts. Accounting systems waited for somebody to type in the evidence. Torpago would put the card, controls, reimbursements and reconciliation in one place.

It worked well enough to prove the product. By 2023, the company said it served more than 1,400 small and midsize businesses. The trouble was the neighborhood. Ramp, Brex, American Express and Capital One were all hunting the same customers. Buying attention in that crowd was expensive, while the most useful distribution already belonged to institutions Jackson had treated as incumbents: community and regional banks.

So Torpago changed the buyer. Its Powered By platform lets a bank launch a business card and spend-management program wearing the bank's own name. The institution can issue physical and virtual cards, set controls, see transaction data, connect accounting tools and operate the program through a bank-facing console. Torpago supplies technology and, when asked, the less photogenic but essential work of underwriting, compliance, support, servicing and design.

The prototype came before the code

Jackson's path into the problem was unusually literal. He studied finance and accounting, worked in Deloitte's corporate tax group, then became the first employee at accounts-payable startup Accrualify. He has said he did almost everything there except write code. Thousands of conversations with smaller companies exposed the same complaint: once a business grew beyond roughly 10 to 20 employees, cards and expenses became a patchwork of manual work and disconnected tools.

In 2020 he quit, raised $250,000 from friends and family and began as a solo founder. An outside team in India built the first prototype. But the order matters. Torpago showed clickable mockups to 25 prospects before serious development began. Ten became customers when the bare-bones MVP arrived about seven months later. That is the most copyable part of the origin story: do not ask prospects whether they like your idea. Put a crude version in front of them, count who stays interested and only then pay for the machinery.

Cards also made Torpago more expensive than ordinary SaaS. Software could not extend credit by itself. Early funding supported customer balances until six months of repayment history helped the company secure a $3 million facility from Pier Asset Management. Jackson said that loan supported roughly the first 300 customers. A later financing package blended much larger lending capacity with equity. The lesson is not “raise debt.” It is to match the capital to the job: equity pays people to improve software; lending capital funds receivables. Confusing the two can turn growth into dilution or a cash crisis.

“We realized early on that this is not the market we wanted to go after.”

What failed first was distribution

Direct sales proved hard to scale. Torpago responded with an affiliate program for content creators, paying for approved applications. Applications jumped. The company eventually reached about 2,000 direct business customers, according to Jackson. Yet the higher the company climbed, the clearer the strategic problem became. A competent product was entering an advertising, capital and feature contest against better-funded brands.

The change of mind came from listening to banks. They had deposits, commercial relationships and card volume, but often lacked the software experience that newer fintechs made normal. Worse, outsourcing a card program could hide their own customer data. Torpago's answer was not another Torpago-branded card. It was a white-label stack with reporting visible to the institution.

The Sunwest Bank example makes the pain concrete. Sunwest estimated that more than $100 million of its clients' annual card spend was flowing to providers such as American Express and Capital One. That meant lost fee income, less visibility into customer behavior and a risk that an outside card company could sell more banking services back to Sunwest's clients. With Torpago and issuing-platform partner Marqeta, the bank launched its Visionary Card in early 2024 under the Sunwest brand.

A card is the shiny tip of a dull iceberg

Torpago now presents three main product layers. Business Credit Cards covers branded physical and virtual issuance, real-time controls and reporting. Spend Management handles policies, approvals, receipts, reimbursements and integrations. The Bank Admin Tool centralizes onboarding, underwriting, settlement, reconciliation, support and program data. Underneath, the company describes an event-driven, cloud-native system written in Go, deployed on Kubernetes and built around an immutable ledger and open APIs.

The modularity is the differentiator. A bank with its own issuing capability can bring a BIN and retain more control through the Direct Issuer model. An institution that values speed can use an agent model with more of the operational burden handled for it. Either can choose which managed services to buy. That flexibility matters because regulated institutions rarely replace a core process in one clean gulp.

AI appears in practical places rather than as a separate magic window: reviewing transactions, analyzing underwriting inputs, drafting credit materials, assisting risk decisions and navigating administrative work. These claims are promising, but the useful standard is mundane - fewer manual reviews, cleaner audit trails and faster decisions without weakening controls. In banking, an automation that cannot explain what it did is simply a new queue for humans to inspect.

What to steal - and when it breaks

The founder playbook is compact. First, validate workflow pain with artifacts rather than surveys. Second, separate a product failure from a distribution failure. Torpago did not discard its spend platform when customer acquisition became unattractive; it found a buyer with existing distribution. Third, sell the incumbent a better way to defend its strongest asset. Community banks do not need a lecture about disruption. They need fee income, deposit retention, customer data and software their relationship managers can confidently show.

The approach is not universal. White-label infrastructure works when the partner has customers, trust and enough lost card spend to justify implementation. It works when responsibilities for underwriting, compliance, servicing and losses are painfully explicit. It works when the product can bend without becoming a custom-development shop. And it works when the vendor can survive bank sales cycles that make a self-serve SaaS funnel look like speed dating.

Torpago's 2024 Series B added $10 million at a reported $55 million valuation. The company said the money would strengthen implementation and compliance as it onboarded more banks. That use of funds is revealing. Once fintech sells infrastructure, polish is only half the product. The other half is getting a regulated customer live without losing the plot in a spreadsheet named “final_v17.”

The company sits between two markets that used to be discussed separately: corporate spend management and bank technology. Against Ramp or Brex, it offers the bank's brand and relationships. Against Fiserv or Finastra, it argues for a more configurable interface, modern architecture and a tighter commercial-card focus. The bet is not that banks disappear. It is that the smaller ones will rent modern software to remain recognizably themselves.

That is a less cinematic ambition than replacing finance. It may also be the more durable one. Torpago found a way to make the incumbent's distribution part of its product. For builders stuck in a crowded category, that is the question worth copying: who already owns the customer you are spending so much money to find?