Plaid: Screen Scraping Bots, Visa's $5.3B Bid and a $58 Million Settlement

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Plaid is the company many people talk to when they type a bank password into an app like Venmo. Founders Zach Perret and William Hockey started in 2012 with a budgeting app, but banks running 1980s mainframes and COBOL code offered no APIs to supply live account data. They pivoted to building that bridge for every developer. With no APIs available, Plaid relied on screen scraping: bots logged into bank websites with customer credentials, read the raw HTML, captured balances and logged out. Banks saw an unauthorized middleman holding customer credentials, but customers who wanted Robinhood, Chime or Coinbase to work gave them little room to block it.

In January 2020 Visa agreed to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion, a deal that court records cited in the episode show CEO Alfred Kelly treated as an insurance policy for Visa's debit business. The Department of Justice sued to block it, and Visa walked away in January 2021. Months later Plaid raised money at a $13.4 billion valuation, then fell to $6.1 billion in a 2025 round involving Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Fidelity before an employee share sale in February 2026 set it at $8 billion. In May 2026 Plaid announced a partnership with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT users link their bank accounts.

• Funding began with a $2.8 million seed round in 2013, and a 2018 Series C led by Mary Meeker valued Plaid at $2.65 billion with Visa and Mastercard investing.
• TD Bank sued in 2020, alleging Plaid showed login screens designed to look almost exactly like TD Bank's own.
• A 2021 class action settlement of $58 million covered about 98 million people, and claimants could take payouts through PayPal or Venmo.
• In April 2023 Plaid added real-time payments so businesses could send loan funds, insurance claims and gig wages instantly.
• Acquisitions of Quovo in 2019 and Cognito in 2022 added brokerage data and identity verification.