What is the problem that Highnote is addressing and how does its solution solve it?

Highnote is about 18 months old. The company was started in the middle of COVID in October of 2020. We’ve grown very fast within this short timespan. We have raised more than $90M in funding at this point in Seed and Series A. The team is now close to 80 people from leading fintech, tech and financial services companies.

The vision of Highnote is to be a unified platform for both issuance and acquiring. Issuing and acquiring are two nodes of the card payment ecosystem that exist in isolation today. You have a lot of companies that do the acquiring part of it, companies like Stripe and so on, and you have issuers on the other end as companies that purely focus on issuance like Marqeta and Galileo. 

No one has built a platform which unifies both issuance and acquiring on a single platform. Highnote will be the industry's first platform built for that purpose in that fashion.

That unlocks a lot of benefits in the payments ecosystem around real-time settlement, reduction in fraud and risk, and unlocking a lot of economies of scale for merchants and issuers in the ecosystem, as well as economic benefits to customers who want a single solution for all of their payments needs. What we have already built and gone live with is a full-stack card issuance platform with a bare-metal connection to both Visa and MasterCard. We’ve built the technology infrastructure from the ground up, connected directly to Visa and Mastercard for processing. Our Mastercard connection is already live. The Visa connection is in final certification.