It’s rare, but I sometimes meet entrepreneurs who immediately light me up because they’ve hit on a thread that has repeatedly surfaced in my career.
That proverbial lightbulb moment happened for me in late 2020 when I was first introduced to Jordan Wright and Scott Weinert, the founders of Atomic Financial.
Backstory: in 2004, as an early Product Manager at Google, I created a project that later became the AdWords API (throwback announcement blog post!) – Google’s first official programmatic interface. From this quiet project sprung an untold number of innovative companies in the advertising space and an incredible amount of creativity both in and outside of Google… all because we opened up our functionality to a world of talent.
As Jordan and Scott described their vision of creating commercially supported APIs where none exist for the payroll provider ecosystem, it just clicked with my past successes. I quickly decided to anchor Greylock’s investment in their seed round and Series A, and today, I’m proud to announce our Series B investment, co-led with Mercato.
One of my fundamentally held Fintech beliefs is this: consumers deserve programmatic access to their data and decisions, and the best institutions will rise to this expectation. Take Coinbase, where Atomic supports the seamless integration of payroll providers into their new paycheck-to-crypto direct deposit offering.
Coinbase is just one of many leading fintech companies which have chosen Atomic as the backbone for their payroll-connected products. And we believe the momentum of scale will widen this lead: more consumers mean more data, more data means better models, better models means a higher success rate, and a higher success rate means winning more partners… who bring more consumers. Rinse, repeat, win.
Speaking of winning, it’s also rare to find a company whose incentives are so well aligned across all of its constituents. Atomic is a win for consumers, financial institutions, fintech firms, and technology partners alike. For consumers, Atomic automatically sets-up and updates direct deposits, and repays financial obligations from their paycheck and tax withholdings. For financial services providers, a data integrator solves for the extreme long-tail of payroll providers in the U.S., including employer-built solutions with non-standard data structures. And with their newest innovation – Uplink – “share your data not your password” – Atomic leads the market in security and privacy.
Atomic’s initial focus on direct deposit switches for the largest consumer fintech apps is a unique and strategic advantage that continues to help them reach scale. Today, Atomic has over 450 unique payroll integrations and is trusted by 70 financial institutions, fintech firms, and technology partners, including 12 of the largest consumer finance apps. And Atomic has 100% year-over-year customer retention from 2020.
In addition to this strong traction, the team behind Atomic is the best out there. Jordan and Scott are fintech veterans and long time colleagues who previously co-founded Unbill, a service to automate bill payment. They are incredibly customer centric, and came highly referenced from their customers. Based in Salt Lake City, they have been able to recruit some of the strongest (and hardest working) engineers and go-to-market teammates that I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
I consider myself lucky (truly, in the Chance IV sense of the word) to have met Jordan and Scott, and I’m luckier still that they decided to invite Greylock to be a part of their mission and success. If you’re interested in learning more about Atomic, they are hiring!
