Finch

Finch kicked off the 2024 fiscal year by being named San Francisco Startup of the Year by HackerNoon, and recognized by Activant Capital as a leader among Unified APIs—an emerging market that Activant anticipates will grow rapidly. 

Following a strong fiscal 2023, Finch continued to build momentum in the first fiscal quarter of 2024, which ended April 30, with the following accomplishments:

• Grew platform usage at a 99% annualized growth rate. 
• Announced a partnership with Oyster, a leading global employment solution, and finalized partnerships with six more HRIS and payroll providers, to be announced in the coming months.
• Signed a major payroll and benefits provider to assist them with connectivity for their benefits product in cooperation with existing partners.
• Finch Dashboard updates, including: a new way to enable, disable, and configure integrations, more granular permissions with role-based access control, and enhanced dashboard security with MFA (multi-factor authentication).
• Finch API updates, including a new rehire date field in the /employment endpoint, and a new endpoint to help ‘register’ existing payroll deductions (/register).
• Improved or expanded integrations with five leading HRIS and payroll providers: Workday, UKG Ready, Justworks, TriNet, and Paychex. 
• Expanded support for the Finch Sandbox, which can now be used to test our Deductions product and assisted providers. 

“As part of our commitment to the Open Employment Ecosystem, we’re excited to work with one of the largest payroll and HRIS providers in the US to assist them with their benefits product,” said Jeremy Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO. “We look forward to working with providers as customers in concert with our partners to facilitate complementary use cases where everyone wins.”

To learn more about how Finch can help your organization broaden connectivity to HRIS and payroll systems, speak with an integration expert today. 

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About Finch

Finch is the #1 unified API for employment systems, with industry-leading coverage across hundreds of payroll and HRIS providers. Our technology underpins the employment ecosystem, securely connecting applications with the employers they serve. Finch powers integrations for hundreds of platforms including Human Interest, Carta, and Nayya.

Applications across HR technology, benefits, tax and compliance, fintech, and insurance use Finch to access a wide range of employment data — including company information, employee directories, employment status, pay statements, benefits eligibility, and more. 

Finch has helped over 40,000 employers securely connect their data between applications. As the world moves toward standardized, open and interconnected data systems, Finch is building the infrastructure to make it easy to share employment data securely. Our vision is to create a connected and programmable employment ecosystem for all.

We’re thrilled to share that Finch has been named the Best Enterprise Software Product in the SaaS Revolutionaries by SaaStock. This award highlights our relentless dedication to innovation and excellence in democratizing access to employment data.

SaaS Revolutionaries recognizes and celebrates the SaaS startups taking the reins in North America. This year it honored SaaS disruptors across six different categories, including business growth, go-to-market strategies, entrepreneurship, and product. 

Finch's recognition in this competitive arena underscores our status as a disruptive SaaS solution that provides exceptional value to enterprise customers, further solidifying our reputation as a leader in the rapidly emerging unified API market.

“Our mission at Finch is to revolutionize the employment ecosystem by enhancing connectivity and providing seamless access to critical employment data,” said Ansel Parikh, Co-Founder and COO of Finch. “SaaStock’s recognition reinforces our dedication to supporting innovators as they continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in employment technology.”

Want to learn more about Finch?

Finch is the #1 unified API for employment data, arming innovators with read and write access to 200+ employment systems, all through a single integration. If you are driving innovation with employment data, get started with our self-serve platform today—it’s free!

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Employers felt the repercussions of a slew of macro trends and technology changes in 2023: workforce volatility, challenging economic conditions, growing data security threats, and the rise of generative AI.

To adapt, employers turned to technology, seeking fast, user-friendly, and integrated tools to automate manual tasks and enable their teams to focus on high-priority work. More than ever before, they relied on their platforms’ ability to access and share employment data that has historically been locked within systems of record.

Since 2020, Finch has been committed to democratizing access to the otherwise complex, closed, and fragmented employment ecosystem so innovators are empowered to build powerful new solutions. Now, we’re looking back at what we accomplished together in 2023—and sharing our big goals for the year to come.

2023 Highlights

In 2023, we continued to expand the breadth and depth of Finch’s integration coverage and took our first step into write-back capabilities with the public launch of our newest product, Deductions. We hyper-focused on the developer experience to make connecting to Finch as seamless as possible, so our customers can focus on investing in their core product and bringing more value to employers.

A few major milestones helped us get here—from raising our Series B and expanding our Finch team to growing our network of partners and expanding our data coverage in new ways. 

Let’s take a closer look:

Investing in our team to build the #1 Unified Employment API

Finch started the year strong with a $40 million Series B round led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with participation from PruVen Capital, Altman Capital, and QED Investors. A few months later, we received an additional investment from Intuit Ventures, reflecting their trust and interest in Finch’s aim to enable Intuit Quickbooks’ partners and small business customers to connect applications to their payroll data. 

This new capital helped us support our customers in building new, innovative use cases across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals.

Our product is only as good as the team that stands behind it—so we invested in that team, growing our headcount by 67% to 80 employees. These reinforcements helped us reach new heights in 2023, like… 

3M+ employees connected through Finch

Since we started Finch in 2020, we’ve connected more than 3 million employees across nearly 40,000 employers. 

• Bigger network → more connections Finch integrates with 200+ HRIS & Payroll providers, covering 88% of all U.S. employers.
• More connections = more API calls Last year alone, we handled more than 1 billion API calls—that’s 31.7 per second!
• More API calls demand more reliability We understand that our customers place their trust in us when they connect to Finch’s API, so we worked hard to increase our field coverage and reliability in 2023. I’m proud to say that those efforts resulted in 99.99% uptime.

Launched new product to general access: Deductions API

Traditionally, for benefits providers, employer onboarding and enrollment has been a long, tedious process requiring a series of manual operations, heavy administrative burden, and coordination across multiple teams. Our recent survey of over 1,000 HR professionals revealed that HR teams invest 3-5 hours per payroll cycle to ensure accurate deductions and contributions for employees.

To automate this process, we launched a new product: Deductions APIs. This offering enables benefits applications to create and update employer contributions and employee deductions in their customers’ payroll systems, enabling use cases like automatic enrollment. We’re proud to be the only unified API offering it today.

Employers took notice: Deductions saw a 9x increase in adoption since its beta release. By leveraging this product, some of the largest retirement and benefits companies in the country offered employers greater compliance capabilities with new legislation like the SECURE Act 2.0, providing peace of mind for employers and an easier enrollment experience for employees.

This was just our first foray into Deductions—looking ahead, we plan to expand our coverage of popular payroll systems to serve more employers, broaden our deduction type support, and support complex edge cases like tiered and catch-up contributions. 

Announcing best-in-class partnerships with top employment providers

In 2023, we forged partnerships with leading employment providers, unlocking read and write capabilities to these employment systems of record.

• Gusto — An all-in-one HR platform, Gusto serves 200,000 small business employers and has been rated the Best Payroll Software of 2023 by the U.S. News and World Report.
• Paycor — Paycor’s HR platform modernizes people management for 40,000 employers ranging in size from 1–5,000 employees and had the highest user adoption among enterprise solutions in 2023, according to G2.
• Personio — Personio’s 6,000 employers across the globe benefit from automated and simplified HR tasks through a single platform. 
• UKG — UKG is an all-in-one suite of human capital management (HCM) applications used by 80,000 employers that has been recognized as a top-rated solution by G2, TrustRadius, and more.

Partnerships like these were huge stepping stones toward our broader vision of building a more connected experience for employers and accelerating innovation in the employment space.

Delivering an improved developer experience

Our mission is to democratize access to employment data, so it’s important that we make it easy for developers to connect applications to Finch. We introduced several features this year to provide more timely access to data, help developers build to Finch better and faster, and expand our data coverage in new ways.

• Real-time status updates with Finch webhooks for account update events, job completion events, and data change events
• Data syncs user interface (UI) to give developers, support teams, and product managers a quickly accessible dashboard containing the status of scheduled and requested data syncs across all connected customers
• Data Refresh endpoint for developers to request new data whenever they need it
• Provider Sandbox and backend software development kits (SDK) in multiple languages to help developers test integrations before building and spend less time on boilerplate code
• Request Forwarding to enable developers to make direct requests to employment systems and access any functionality that is natively supported by a provider’s API—even those outside of the scope of our standardized data models

2024 Goals and Plans

A successful 2023 paved the way for a brighter 2024—and we’re incredibly excited for what's to come. This year, we'll scale Finch’s product offering to accommodate greater coverage and more complicated setups, dive into payment operations, and expand across more employment systems. Here’s a preview of what we have up our sleeves for this year:

• Grow the Finch Provider Network — In 2024, we’ll expand the coverage and number of providers we support. At the same time, we’re committing to forging new partnerships, further increasing our API’s reliability, and supporting new, complex setups.
• Go deep with read-write capabilities — Deductions was our foray into productizing critical write-back capabilities from benefits providers to payroll systems; but we’re not stopping there. There is so much more value that we can offer in the employment stack. In partnership with our current customers, we’re exploring new offerings in payment operations, such as employee earnings and time and attendance.
• Expand to employment systems beyond HR and payroll — The rise of the Open Employment Ecosystem is inevitable. In the same way Open Finance has unleashed a new era of innovation in fintech, we believe a more accessible and connected employment ecosystem is a win-win-win for employment systems of record, third-party applications, and the employers they serve.

To catalyze this revolution in employment data access, we started with HR and payroll. But we’ll need to go beyond these systems of record and connect with new segments to unite the entire employment stack. We’re looking forward to exploring those next steps—stay tuned.

Build with Finch

In 2023, we worked alongside our customers to deliver the infrastructure that connects the employment industry, helping employers own their mission-critical data. This year, we’ll build on our momentum with continued investment in our talent, our resources, and our products to create an employment ecosystem where data and payment flow is safe, fast, and convenient.

We’re always looking to help innovators address crucial problems across the ecosystem and get to market faster. Get in touch with us or sign up for free.

The votes are in

Finch is HackerNoon’s Startup of the Year in San Francisco! We’re honored to be recognized as the top startup in a city brimming with technology trailblazers. 

Startup of the Year is HackerNoon’s global community-driven award that celebrates the world’s most innovative and game-changing tech ventures. This year’s competition included more than 30,000 entities across six continents and 4,200 cities. 

In addition to being designated as the top startup in San Francisco, Finch placed third among all startups in North America. We’re committed to building on this momentum in 2024 as we continue our mission to democratize access to employment data, unlock innovations, and create an integrated user experience for employers and employees.

"Today's macro environment requires companies to do more with less, so it's not surprising that HR professionals are looking to their tech stacks and process improvements to help them accomplish this. The tools that offer the best user experience, functionality, and connectivity will win in a competitive landscape," said Ansel Parikh, COO and Co-Founder of Finch. 

World-class win

While the winners were chosen by voters around the world, the nominees were required to fulfill either or both of the two following criteria:

• Generated between $50,000 to $50 million in annual expected revenue
• Secured $1 million to $100 million in funding

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"Reflecting the technology industry requires a comprehensive company database, and with this campaign, I'm excited to discover and showcase the world's best startups," said David Smooke, HackerNoon Founder and CEO. "We are building an open, reliable, and editable technology startup database that will enable technologists to make informed decisions about which emerging startups to learn about, invest in, partner with, or even work for."

Finch is a unified API for employment data. We are working to provide innovators with mission-critical employment data, including read and write compatibility with 200+ employment systems (HRIS, payroll, directories)—with just one integration. If you are driving innovation with employment data, get started with our self-serve platform today—it’s free!

We are thrilled to share that GGV Capital U.S., in partnership with Crunchbase, has named Finch in its Fintech Innovation 50—a list highlighting the rising stars in the fintech sector. It is another notable achievement for Finch after last year's recognition in GGV's inaugural Embedded Fintech 50 list.

GGV Capital's Fintech Innovation 50 reflects the continued trust of the investors in the fintech industry—including financial infrastructure, lending, AI, and more. In celebration of the launch, the honorees were invited to ring the opening bell at the Nasdaq Marketsite this morning. 

Finch, a unified employment API, is committed to increasing connectivity in the employment data ecosystem and providing fintech firms with greater data access. 

"Time and time again, we have seen how data silos across HR, payroll, and benefits systems have stunted organizational growth and technical innovation in fintech. Our goal is to simplify secure access to employment data. GGV Capital's recognition motivates us to continue improving connectivity, innovation, and automation in the employment-fintech ecosystem,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder of Finch.

For the 2024 list, 150 companies were nominated by 44 investment firms. The firms submitted an equal number of portfolio and non-portfolio companies and voted on the aggregate list. The nomination criteria included companies with the following:

• A primary focus on fintech
• The U.S. as a primary market
• Series A financing or beyond

Here is the complete list of Fintech Innovation 50 honorees, the methodology, and participating investors.

Even amidst the uncertainties looming in the fintech sector in 2023—including decreased valuation and increased interest rates—these emerging and established players ignited possibilities in the eyes of startup investors. 

"Despite a rocky 2023, the list celebrates the innovation, perseverance, and the future potential of fintech," said Hans Tung, Managing Partner, GGV Capital U.S. "We believe the long-term tides are in fintech's favor with disruptors and value-added enablers like the Fintech Innovation 50 honorees leading the charge."

Finch is a universal API for employment data. We are working to provide innovators with mission-critical employment data, including read and write compatibility with 200+ employment systems (HRIS, payroll, directory). If you are driving innovation with employment data, get in touch with us.

We are excited to announce that Finch is named in the Built In’s 2024 Best Places to Work list. This is Finch’s second win after being ranked #12 for Built In’s 50 Best Startups To Work for in San Francisco 2023. 

This time, we are elated to be named alongside the biggest employers in tech for not one but three categories:

• Best Places to Work, Seattle
• Best Startups to Work, Seattle
• Best Startups to Work, San Francisco

Each year, Built In Best Places to Work recognizes top employers across the country—startups and tech enterprises alike. The award is given to companies that offer the best compensation packages, total benefits, and cultural programs. 

It is based on the data that reflects what tech candidates are searching for in their future workplaces—from flexible work opportunities to innovative employee benefits.

This award is a testament to our commitment to building a people-first culture that inspires talented professionals to do their best work.

"At Finch, the team comes first. We're proud to have built a workplace that prioritizes culture and fosters individual development in addition to highly competitive total rewards packages. Built In’s recognition is a great reminder to keep setting even higher standards of workplace practices as we grow," says Ansel Parikh, COO & Co-Founder, Finch.

At Finch, all of our decisions and actions are driven by our core values—curiosity, execution, humility, and empathy. We not only strive for team progress but consistently encourage individual growth. 

• Our benefits packages include generous stipends of $1,000 work from home and $200/month flex benefits. We also cover 100% of health insurance plans for employees and offer unlimited PTO, including a mandatory 15-day minimum per year.
• As a people-first organization, we foster a culture of appreciation and gratitude and take the time to celebrate one another’s accomplishments. Plus, we promote talent from within. 
• Finch offers a hybrid-flexible workplace that helps our employees maintain a healthy work-life balance and cultivate hobbies outside of work. 
• We fly the entire team out for bonding activities for our semi-annual company offsites.
• Our fast-paced work environment offers tremendous opportunities for honing professional skill sets and creating an impact that moves the needle forward.

“I’d like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to the 2024 Best Places to Work winners,” says Maria Christopoulos Katris, CEO, Built In. “I am truly inspired by these companies that have risen to the challenge of fostering a positive work environment, maintaining a strong brand, and ensuring employee satisfaction. The future is filled with promise and we are so excited to see what lies ahead.”

Join us to shape the future of employment. Apply to one of our open positions.

Today we’re proud to announce additional funding led by Intuit Ventures, the venture capital fund of Intuit. Intuit’s QuickBooks payroll is the #1 payroll provider for small businesses.

The employment data ecosystem was built in an era of data silos. Even today, connectivity remains a challenge with the standard practices to share mission-critical employment data bottlenecked by flat files, emails, and even faxes. We are in the early stages of an industry-wide evolution toward a more connected, secure ecosystem allowing for innovative solutions across fintech, HR tech, compliance, insurance, and benefits to proliferate.

Today marks another step toward that inevitable, connected future. Just four months following our $40M Series B investment announcement, we have raised additional capital from Intuit Ventures. With over 1.6 million businesses utilizing Intuit’s payroll in fiscal 2022, Quickbooks is the leading payroll provider for small businesses. Their deep expertise in business software, combined with their proven track record of building 3rd party application marketplaces made them a natural fit for Finch as we continue to unify the employment data ecosystem.

"We are constantly looking to invest in innovative companies that are solving critical problems our customers face.” said Adam Coccari, Managing Director of Intuit Ventures. “Finch’s unified API currently enables our partners and small business customers to seamlessly connect apps to their data in Intuit QuickBooks payroll so the products that they love work together. We look forward to collaborating with Finch as they build deeper integrations to serve developers and our joint customers.”

We’re particularly excited by what this means for customers and end users — we are well on our way to building a future of employment that’s open, connected, and programmable. Today’s employers are demanding their systems of record speak to one another so they can get the best insights into their operations. By opening up the Employment Data Ecosystem, Finch can unlock the full potential of the suite of solutions that utilize HR, payroll and benefits data. This investment from Intuit, a major player in the employment data ecosystem, further strengthens our position as the leading employment data API.

Join our team to help shape the future of the employment ecosystem! To learn more about Finch’s solutions, talk to our sales team or sign up for free today.

Finch at SHRM23

Finch is proud to be a sponsor of the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo for 2023. Learn what we’re most looking forward to during the upcoming events and how you can find us. 

The SHRM Annual Conference & Expo is one of the premiere events for HR professionals. This year, the conference is taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center from Sunday, June 11 to Wednesday, June 14. 

SHRM23 boasts a wide variety of education sessions, so teams can customize their schedules and attend panels that address individual challenges and business goals. With over 15,000 attendees and 650+ solutions providers, we’re excited for the chance to network with all of you and demonstrate Finch’s full capabilities in-person.

Finding Finch at SHRM23

We’ll be set up at Booth 2330. Come say hello, and grab some limited-edition, light-up memo boards while you’re there!

Finch focuses on accessing the employment data that's housed in HR, payroll, and benefits systems.

Our universal API integrates with 200+ HR, payroll, and benefits systems to help employers streamline onboarding, optimize employee benefits, and unlock tax savings—amongst many other use cases.

With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the #1 API for unlocking the vast potential of employment data.

What the Finch team is looking forward to

When we’re not at Booth 2330, we’ll be checking out all the conference has to offer. We’ve looked through the SHRM23 content tracks and are happy to share the ones we’re most excited to attend: 

• At the start of the conference, we’ll be at “Using Integrated Analytics to Showcase the Business Value of Human Capital” since employment data is the heart of everything we do at Finch. 
• We’ll be sure to swing by “The Future of Work: Five Non-Negotiable Priorities for HR's Agenda” to learn more about the ever-evolving reinvention of work.
• We’re also looking forward to “Retirement Legislative Madness: Breaking Down Secure 2.0 Small Employer/No Plan Edition” since our API integrates with HR platforms like Gusto, Zenefits, and BambooHR to automate participant onboarding and deductions and contributions management. 
• The panel on “Analytics Plus Hiring: The Evolving Parameters and Employment Law Concerns” is going to be interesting. We’re curious to learn more about the different ways HR departments are using analytics to improve decisions on their workforce talent acquisition and employee retention, and how they’re gaining access to those much-needed data points. 
• You’ll see us at both the Kick-Off Conference Orientation and Expo Opening Reception on Sunday, June 11, and hopefully we’ll have the chance to watch the iconic Janet Jackson perform at the SHRM23 concert on Tuesday evening. 

Of course, we’re also excited for the recently announced moderated Q&A conversation with 42nd U.S. President Bill Clinton on the Main Stage.

More about Finch

Finch allows you to securely access your customers’ employment data across hundreds of HRIS and payroll systems with a single integration.

Employment data includes:

• Employee directory information like name, contact information, date of birth, manager, salary, and start/end date
• Employee income information including hours worked, salary, wages, deductions, and taxes
• Company information such as legal name, address, taxpayer classification, EIN, and banking details

We recently raised $40 million in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.

Finch is putting this capital to work by investing in both new and existing products—like our Data Refresh endpoint and recent upgrades to Finch Connect—and expanding our team to support customers and partners across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals. 

We were named one of 2023’s Best Places to Work by Built In and recently included on GGV Capital’s API-First Index. 

Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest takes on the future of work.

Finch is thrilled to share that it’s been named the Best Innovative or Emerging Tech Solution for the Core HR/Workforce category by the Lighthouse Research & Advisory 2023 HR Tech Awards program.

Now in its fourth year, the HR Tech Awards program highlights HR technology companies that serve employers and employees with entries from North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The program has a rigorous judging component with a panel of independent practitioners, consultants, and educators who assess each submission.

Today, employment data is hosted across thousands of disparate systems and employers increasingly expect the tools they use to service their workforce to talk to each other with little friction. Given the fragmentation and rising expectations, employment applications are faced with the costly dilemma of either building 1:1 integrations in-house or losing business to competitors that offer compatibility. Finch helps solve the fragmentation challenge with a unified employment API, allowing businesses to cut costs and time spent on integrations, freeing them up to focus on value-added services that differentiate these applications instead.

Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research & Advisory has this to say about Finch:

"Integration of systems and data is one of the most common complaints for HR software today. Finch is helping to turn complicated and technical into the possible, enabling the seamless passing of employee data among 200+ different systems via a single powerful integration.”

According to Lighthouse Research & Advisory data, more than 5,000 providers exist across the HR technology landscape, with more startups and innovators entering the industry every single day. This year, the HR Tech Awards recognizes approximately 1% of those firms for creating solutions that solve problems their customers care about.

The world is moving towards more standardized, open, and interconnected data systems. However, employment data infrastructure remains complex, closed, and fragmented. Finch is dedicated to bringing forth a connected future of employment and is honored to have its technology recognized.

To get a free consultation regarding what Finch can do for your business, talk to our sales team, or if you’d like to test it out on your own, you can sign up for a free account today.

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We’re excited to announce that On Deck ranked Finch #2 on its Top 40 Companies of 2023 list, reinforcing our vision to build a future where employment is connected and programmable. 

About On Deck and its annual list of top companies

On Deck launched its first fellowship in 2019. To date, the organization has helped start and accelerate hundreds of companies, which are now worth over $9 billion. What started as a passion project has grown into a worldwide network and community of the most ambitious people around the globe.

In an effort to consistently showcase the best and most promising On Deck companies, every year the organization publishes its list of top performers. On Deck considers a number of factors during the selection process, including funding raised, valuation, and momentum over the last year. The nature and importance of the problems companies are tackling also factors into the team’s decision. This year’s list includes 40 companies that have demonstrated significant traction over the past 12 months.

The market need for an open employment data ecosystem

Being recognized as a high performer by On Deck underscores the market need for an open employment data ecosystem. 

The workforce is the backbone of the U.S. economy. From retirement benefits to health insurance to mental health, employers’ responsibilities have significantly increased over the years. Despite the challenges posed by the macro backdrop, U.S. employment has been growing steadily, with the unemployment rate at its lowest in 54 years. 

Unfortunately, the employment ecosystem faces significant challenges due to a lack of data accessibility. Over 580 million U.S. employment records and $15 trillion of funds are processed across more than 20,000 employment data systems, including payroll, HRIS, benefits administration, ATS, and others. The ecosystem also lacks connectivity, with sensitive records mostly passed via manual data entry, SFTP, and unsecured emails. 

We are here to change that by making it easy to read and write employment data at scale with our unified employment API. With Finch, applications can instantly integrate with over 200 employment systems to provide products and services to employers. To learn more, visit tryfinch.com.

Finch's Industry-Leading Employment API Recognized in GGV Capital's API-First Index

Finch is excited to announce that we’ve been included on GGV Capital's API-First Index.

GGV Capital is a global investment firm with $9.2 billion under management. It tracks the activity of VC deals for 120+ private companies to find those with the most promising approaches to API commercialization.

The significance of the API-First Index

GGV’s API-First Index focuses on API-led startups whose primary goal is developing and delivering scalable APIs, so their clients can build better products and services while improving the agility of their development process.

GGV recently expanded the index to include those that have each raised over $50 million in funding.

The index underscores the critical role APIs play in shaping the future of business and technology by highlighting the increasing importance of APIs as drivers of innovation and growth.

“We are going all-in on API companies because they will fundamentally simplify software development. APIs will allow developers to offload lower-value and time-consuming components of application development so they can focus on higher-value work,” states GGV.

Funding trends from the API-First Index

The API-First Index delivers a valuable benchmark for companies that want to keep pace with the rapidly evolving API landscape, and provides insights into emerging API trends to help businesses and investors identify potential partners and investment opportunities.

In 2022, the companies listed on the API-First Index raised approximately $2.1 billion in total funding, a 70% decrease from 2021, but 19% higher than 2020 and 45% higher than 2019.

“2021 was an outlier year for the VC industry broadly, including API-first companies. We believe it’s important to establish that 2021—catalyzed by historically low interest rates and rapid digital adoption spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic—was a once-in-a-decade moment,” said GGV in its 2022 Year in Review.

The context provided around VC activity in 2021 is important. For example, the number of deals in 2022 also decreased, but the average size of deals increased to approximately $60 million—50% higher than deals in 2019 and 2020. It could be that investors are targeting more mature companies and later-stage funding rounds, since these companies require bigger investments to scale their operations.

While the startup ecosystem has continued to see more diminished funding since 2021, the increase from the preceding years is a good sign. VC funding certainly hasn’t dried up and could be poised for a slow rebound as investors focus on making more informed decisions about companies’ potential for revenue growth.

Employment data’s future role in the API space

Finch’s inclusion on the API-First Index demonstrates that the demand for employment data portability will continue to shape the future of the API space.

Employment data includes:

• Employee directory information like name, contact information, date of birth, manager, salary, and start/end date
• Employee income information including hours worked, salary, wages, deductions, and taxes
• Company information such as legal name, address, taxpayer classification, EIN, and banking details

An employment data API like Finch provides secure access to sources of employment data—human resource information systems and payroll systems—with a single integration.

Employment data APIs make it possible for B2B applications across a variety of industries to leverage employment data to fuel innovative products and seamless customer experiences. Here are just some of the ways B2B applications are deploying employment data to change the future of workforce management, business operations, commercial finance, tax, and insurance:

• Performance management—Monitoring employee productivity in real-time and providing feedback and coaching based on performance metrics
• Predictive analytics—Identifying which employees are most likely to leave the company then taking proactive steps to retain them
• Personalized learning and development opportunities—Recommending specific training programs to employees based on performance metrics and career aspirations
• Benefits administration—Automatically enrolling employees in benefits programs based on their payroll data
• Budget forecasting—Forecasting budgets with more accuracy by gaining a better understanding of their labor costs
• Tax compliance—Generating and streamlining reports on taxes, compliance, and other regulatory requirements to ensure compliance with all relevant regulations
• Underwriting and risk assessment—Utilizing up-to-date census and payroll data to actively assess risk, adjust premiums, and determine appropriate rates for insurance coverage
• Claims processing—Verifying claimants’ employment history and status to help prevent fraudulent claims

Employment data APIs will play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of business as companies of every size, shape, and vertical increasingly demand integrated, data-driven experiences from the B2B applications that serve them.

Learn more about Finch

Finch is a universal API for employment data.

We’re singularly positioned to provide you with mission-critical infrastructure for employment data across a wide range of verticals—including read-and-write compatibility with 200+ employment systems covering more than 88% of U.S. employers—and enable data transfers between employers and applications.

With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the trusted HRIS and payroll API solution for discerning B2B applications. For more details, visit tryfinch.com.

Today we’re launching Finch and announcing our $3.5M seed financing led by General Catalyst with participation from Menlo Ventures, YCombinator, BoxGroup, Homebrew, Clocktower Ventures, and many incredible angels including the founders of Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Vouch, Digits, Human Interest, and executives from Plaid.

APIs are changing many industries and taking advantage of the paradigm shift from closed systems to open data access. My co-founder, Ansel, and I have witnessed this first-hand while working at our previous companies: I was an early engineer and led Product at Smartcar (a16z and NEA), an API for connected vehicles; Ansel was previously an investor at Bond and Kleiner, making investments in API companies like Plaid.

Ansel and I initially teamed up to build an embedded lending infrastructure platform, Extend, and allow vendors to easily offer lending products to their customers. This process involved everything from pulling data from multiple sources to creating A/B tests for credit models. We had several funding sources and partners lined up until COVID hit. Suddenly, customers dropped left and right. I guess no one wanted to launch a lending product during a global pandemic? 🤷

As luck would have it, during that time one of our partners approached us to talk about offering PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans to the SMBs on their platform. We started reaching out to legacy and tech-enabled payroll and HR providers to discuss integrations and support the businesses that were in need. Most did not reply and those that did wanted us to present a PowerPoint proposal to different teams within the org. As a developer, we were looking for a Segment, Plaid, or Stripe-like developer experience, but we woefully discovered that such an API infrastructure did not exist.

The big picture

Payroll and HR systems are one of the last business systems without modern API infrastructure, yet they are critical to the operations of every business. These systems serve as the source of truth for employee records, organizational structure, and crucial fund flows. Many industries depend on accurate employee and organization data — from accounting to retirement planning to benefits administration.

Due to the importance and extensibility of these systems, developers expect a simple developer experience, but there are no self-serve APIs in the industry. Many developers have been forced to resort to CSV uploads, FTP, or be added as Third-Party Admins. Other companies have instead opted to spend millions in development costs, alongside years of business development efforts, to build one-off integrations. For example, the co-founder and CTO of Human Interest, a prominent 401(k) provider, said that building payroll and HR integration was one of the most time-consuming parts of their engineering effort, but it was essential to their success. This lack of connectivity in the industry is responsible for high administrative costs for employers, increased lock-in by legacy providers, and prohibitively high barriers for innovators.

We built Finch to change that.

Introducing Finch

Finch does the hard work of integrating with payroll and HR systems to expose a clean, unified API interface to developers. We build the infrastructure for many systems that touch employee records and facilitate data from employers to applications.

We are supporting a growing set of compelling use cases in both FinTech and HRTech, including — 401(k) providers, headcount planning, SMB lending, FP&A software, R&D tax credits, security compliance (SOC-II, etc.), employment verification, health benefits, and many more.

Finch powers innovations for employers and employees

An example of an application built on Finch is Mainstreet, which automates business tax credits for startups. At the beginning of the onboarding flow, Mainstreet prompts an employer to connect their payroll and HR system through Finch’s front-end module. They use Finch to pull past payroll runs, employee locations, employee titles, and more to provide the highest amount of tax savings to an employer. Finch has been the infrastructure powering over $65M in credits back to startups and SMBs.

Building the future of employment

This fundraising round is only the beginning of the journey and new use cases are yet to be discovered. As the nature of employment shifts over the coming years, Finch will empower innovators to build better products and experiences for a changing workforce, whether that is supporting the next wave of PPP loans or building a new employee benefit.

If this work excites you, we are hiring a diverse group of people to help us build, and if you are building something in the space, we would love to get in touch!

At Finch, our mission is to empower innovators to access the global employment ecosystem. Since starting the company in late 2020, we’ve been excited about building a future in which the employment sector is both connected and programmable.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Finch has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Menlo Ventures, alongside General Catalyst, Bedrock, Y Combinator, and Sempervirens. We also brought on founders and executives from Gusto, ADP, Namely, Justworks, Workday, and other employment providers. Additionally, we are excited to have Matt Murphy, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, join our board of directors, and Croom Beatty, Partner at Menlo Ventures, and Alex Tran, Managing Director at General Catalyst, join as Board Observers.

Enabling connectivity with Finch

The employment sector has undergone an important transformation over the past two years. Employers, financial technology, benefit providers, and HR applications have had to meet the rising expectations of today’s workforce. Adapting to these expectations requires robust connectivity to employment systems (HR, payroll, and benefits). Given the industry’s fragmentation (there are 6,000+ employment providers in the U.S.) and the complexity of the underlying data and functions, such an infrastructure did not exist prior to Finch.

Without that infrastructure, many companies have been forced to resort to CSV uploads and FTP. Other companies have opted to spend millions in development costs, alongside years of business development efforts, to build one-off integrations. For example, the co-founder and CTO of Human Interest, a prominent 401(k) provider, said that building payroll and HR connectivity was one of the most time-consuming parts of their engineering effort, but it was essential to their success.

What they needed was pre-built, universal connectivity that would allow them to reallocate their focus to their core product. Over the past year, Finch took on that responsibility, integrating with employment systems across HR, payroll, and benefits. We now provide mission-critical infrastructure powering applications across hundreds of B2B fintech, benefits, HR, and enterprise verticals. After a little over a year since our public launch, Finch has achieved multiple major milestones:

• Compatibility with 150+ employment systems
• Coverage of >88% of U.S. employers
• 5M+ daily API calls
• 10K+ employers connected to Finch, from small start-ups to publicly traded companies
• 10x YoY revenue growth

Powering the future of employment

Finch will continue expanding our connectivity and building blocks to enable our customers to create more innovation for employers and employees. With this new financing, we are focusing on three critical components of our infrastructure:

• Expanding coverage— Finch is already the leading infrastructure in terms of coverage and will continue down the path to be compatible with all 6,000+ providers in the industry.
• Powering the rails— Late last year, we launched the ability to manage deductions and contributions into payroll systems, a valuable product for all benefits providers. Deductions and contributions are just the beginning, as we will be expanding further down the stack into ACH to employers, reimbursements, garnishment, draft payroll, eligibility verification, and other segments that directly impact money movements.
• Connecting the employee lifecycle— Finch will build data pipes across all types of systems across the industry. We started initially with HR and payroll, the source of truth for employment records, but are continuing to add additional data models across benefits, equity, time and attendance, identity, and more.

The next chapter

We are grateful to our team members, customers, and investors who have supported us through this journey. While we are incredibly proud of how far we have come, we are still in the early innings of the employment sector’s digital transformation. As we look to support the massive growth and change that will entail, we’ll accelerate our investments in building infrastructure that enables an open, friendly, and secure data ecosystem.

If you want to have an incredible impact and the opportunity to change an industry, join our team. We’re hiring for all roles!

How to find Finch at Transform 2023–see you there!

Finch is proud to be a sponsor of the Transform 2023 conference. Hear about what we’re most looking forward to at this year’s show.

Transform 2023, the premiere HR conference for business and people leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors, is running from Monday, March 27 to Wednesday, March 29 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Previously known as HR Transform, this year, the conference has expanded the experience to include global leadership, entrepreneurs, and investors. Transform 2023 will offer opportunities to foster more in-depth relationship building, inform modern enterprise policies and programs from a broader perspective, and increase the scale of tech innovation and business transformation. Their goal is to “transform the workforce, workplace, and work of the future.”

Finding Finch at Transform 2023

We’ll be set up at Booth 501. Come say hello, and grab some limited-edition swag while you’re there!

Our universal API integrates with hundreds of HR, payroll, and benefits systems to help employers streamline onboarding, optimize employee benefits, and unlock tax savings, among many other use cases.

With more than five million API calls every day and tens of thousands of employer connections, Finch is the #1 employment data API.

What the Finch team is looking forward to

We’ve browsed through all the inspired offerings on the Transform 2023 Agenda and highlighted events the Finch team is most excited about below:

• We’re looking forward to the session “Funding the Future of Work: The Venture Capital Perspective.” Employee data provides unique insights into budget allocation, and we’re curious to see if this comes up in the conversation.
• The panel on “Using Data to Embrace an Employee-First Approach to Compensation Planning” is calling out to us. At Finch, we know compensation data can inform and shift the thinking around important decisions and processes regarding employees’ salary payments. (We also know this data can be difficult to access, and we’re here to help.)
• We plan to catch the panels on “Using Data to Develop Truly Inclusive Employee Leave Policies” and “Human Centric Design: Building Together,” to gain even more insight into new use cases for employee data.
• Both “Data-Driven Storytelling for HR: Navigating Growth with Operational Insights” and “Should HR Own the Workplace Tech Stack?” promise to be lively discussions. We’re excited to see more HR teams looking to access and use data to drive their impact on business objectives.
• We’ll also be at the official kickoff reception on Monday evening to celebrate the Transform 10 alongside all the forward-thinking organizations who are being recognized this year. (There’s no way we’d miss the official after party either.)
• Finch will be hosting a VIP event at Topgolf the evening of Tuesday, March 28. If you’re interested, please submit a contact request. Space is limited.
• 💡Insider Tip: Don’t forget that PACE 2023 is taking place alongside Transform 2023 on Monday, March 27 as well.

More about Finch

We recently raised $40 million in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.

Finch is putting this capital to work by investing in both new and existing products, and expanding our team to support customers and partners across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for our latest takes on the future of work.

Today, we're excited to announce that Finch has raised $40M in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.

The workforce is the backbone of the U.S. economy. From retirement to health insurance to mental health, the responsibilities of employers have increased significantly over the years. Despite the challenges posed by the macro backdrop, U.S. employment has been growing steadily, with the unemployment rate at its lowest in 54 years.

However, the employment ecosystem faces significant challenges due to a lack of data accessibility. Over 580M+ U.S. employment records and $15T of funds are processed across 20,000+ employment data systems, including payroll, HRIS, benefits administration, and others. Moreover, the ecosystem lacks necessary connectivity, with records mainly passed via manual data entry, SFTP, and emails filled with sensitive information. We are here to change that by making it easy to access data and direct payments across the sector with our unified employment API.

We've made significant progress since announcing our Series A just eight months ago—

• Several months of positive cash flow and a 12x increase in revenue since the company's Series A round announced in June 2022.
• Over 2 million employees connected through the Finch platform.
• Over 60 employees globally, representing 4x Y/Y growth
• New partnerships with leading employment platforms, including BambooHR, HiBob, and others yet to be announced.

With this funding, we will accelerate connectivity across the employment data ecosystem and help employers and employees use the products and services they need to grow and thrive. We're putting this capital to work by investing in new and existing products and expanding our team to support customers and partners across the HR, Fintech, and Benefits verticals.

Our vision is to build a future where employment is connected and programmable. With Finch, applications can instantly gain compatibility with 200+ employment systems to provide products and services to employers.

Join our team to help shape the future of employment!

We’re excited to announce that GGV Capital, in partnership with Crunchbase, has named Finch to its inaugural Embedded Fintech 50, a list recognizing the most promising fintech companies in the eyes of startup investors.

GGV Capital convened 57 other investment firms to nominate and vote on the 50 honorees. Having raised more than $12 billion collectively, the Embedded Fintech 50 demonstrates the enthusiasm of venture capital investors in the growth and innovation of this sector. In celebration, honorees will ring the Closing Bell at Nasdaq MarketSite today.

People are the most important component of an organization, yet the data required to understand a company’s investment in its workforce is siloed across payroll, HR and benefits systems,” said Jeremy Zhang, CEO at Finch. “Our technology is addressing an important challenge in the employment data ecosystem as companies have been unable to easily derive and act on insights from those disparate data sources, until now. We are grateful to be recognized in this inaugural list and look forward to driving the next generation of automation in a space that has been underserved thus far by the technology industry.

For the inaugural list, 175 companies were nominated, and 50 were selected through a voting process that required the nomination of portfolio and non-portfolio companies. Nomination criteria included companies with a primary product focus on fintech, U.S. as a primary market, and Series A stage. Embedded fintech is defined as financial service platforms or financial service providers that integrate into commercial or financial service platforms.

Embedded fintech is a bright spot in today’s market, and it is exciting to see how companies are democratizing access to financial services through technology,” said Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital. “We are excited for the continued development of the embedded fintech landscape and further creative innovations to come. Congratulations to the Embedded Fintech 50 honorees!

To see the complete list of the 50 honorees, visit embeddedfintech50.com.

To get started with our award-winning API platform, sign up for a free account at https://dashboard.tryfinch.com/signup.