Announcing Method's $2.5M Pre-Seed

At Method, our mission is to improve the financial lives and outcomes for millions of Americans. In order to achieve this, we are building the infrastructure and analytics to empower all companies, especially fintech, to help individuals manage their debt.

As fintech is becoming more self-driven and autonomous, companies are developing better solutions that enable more Americans to sit back and let these platforms manage their finances. Method has built a developer-first API that simplifies, accelerates, and makes debt repayment more secure. We are building the infrastructure for fintechs to develop new products that automate and improve the financial lives and outcomes for millions of Americans. 

How we got here

Previously, we built GradJoy, GradJoy (YC S19), where we worked on creating a holistic financial management platform for student loan debt. GradJoy connected all your student loans to one app and calculated the optimal way to get you out of debt. However, we struggled a lot with the money-moving backend. 

Making a simple payment to a student loan turned out to be a patchwork of physical check mailing and integrations with brittle APIs. Managing payments was a full-time job. This made us realize that there is an opportunity to provide developers with a turn-key infrastructure to add debt repayment to their apps and services.

Our goal is to make money movement for debts as simple as paying your friends on Cash App. Initially, we integrated directly into student loans providers and built 12 merchant integrations. 

After a couple of months of heads-down building, we rapidly expanded to over 4,000+ institutions enabling one-click payments to almost any liability account, including consumer debt – credit cards, student loans, car loans, and mortgages – all through a single API.

We came out of stealth and launched as Method on Product Hunt in late April 2021 and were quickly upvoted to the #3 Product of the Day.

Where we stand and the road ahead

Since our beta launch in late 2021, we have processed over $2M and have 15 active customers. Our companies include personal finance apps, lenders, and benefits providers that are all tackling the debt crisis within their apps. 

We are focused on providing a delightful experience to our developers and their end-users. We recently launched Method Elements, a suite of embeddable debt management components that easily integrate into any application. 

For example, Balance Transfers makes it easy for credit card lenders to transfer balances from users' existing credit cards. Link validates a liability's account number in real-time with the debt servicer allowing to catch input errors and prevent returned payments.

These embeddables, along with debt repayment rails, turbocharge any fintech offering with almost no engineering resources.

Our journey has just started, and we cannot wait to share what’s next. If you are interested in building fast and solving a massive problem, join us we're hiring!

Interested in learning how you can integrate debt repayment into your application? Reach out to us at team@methodfi.com. We cannot wait to see what you’ll build.