Deck, a startup that claims to be building “plaids for the rest of the internet,” has raised $12 million in the Series A funding round.
The New Raise, led by Infinity Ventures, will increase the Montreal-based deck total to $16.5 million since its launch in January 2024. Golden Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures are co-led to develop that kind.
The deck claims to build infrastructure for granted data access to users across the Internet. That browser-based data agent “unlocks” data from any website through automation.
More simply, the deck aims to help users connect any account online, and with the user’s permission, turn information into structured, usable data.
President Frederic Lavoy, CEO Yves Gabriel Lebouf and CTO Bruno Lambert (pictured above, left to right) co-founded the deck in June 2024.
The startup approach is to treat the web itself as an open platform. Users work on the assumption that they have “a lot of valuable data” locked behind a username, password, and session-based portal, and that they cannot be safely shared.
The deck wants to change that.
“Just as Plaid provided an easy and secure way to easily access your bank account data with user permission, decks do the same on 95% of platforms that do not provide APIs, such as utility portals, e-commerce backends, payroll systems, government services, and more,” Leboeuf told TechCrunch. The goal is to make it easy for developers to access data that users already have without all the manual work
When users connect their accounts, Deck’s infrastructure handles everything behind the scenes. The AI agent logs in, navigates and extracts data “as humans do, but faster, more reliably, and at a larger scale.”
Next, we generate scripts to keep those connections live and reusable without bringing any further AI involvement.
“Companies use decks to eliminate the friction of getting user data from places where APIs do not exist, or from places where they are incomplete, expensive, or unreliable,” says Leboeuf. “It’s basically a ‘Plaid-Iffie’ website. Whether you’re doing accounting, KYC, reporting, or business verification, decks allow you to build functionality in minutes rather than months. ”
Repeat Founder
Leboeuf and Lavoie previously launched Flinks, a startup called “Plaid of Canada.” The National Bank of Canada acquired it in 2021 for approximately USD 140 million. (Lambert was one of Flinks’ first engineers.)
After its sale, the founder began talking to entrepreneurs in the industry.
“I’ve heard the same thing over and over again. The data is corrupt,” Lebov said.
One founder had food sales intelligence trapped in dozens of “clumsy” distributor portals. Over another few months I tried (and failed) to access music royalty data.
“We went through the problems firsthand,” Lavoy said. “The pattern was clear. Data access was fragmented, fragile and failed. It was everywhere, not just in the bank.”
So they built a deck. The deck is in competition today with Arcadia, a company that the founder tried to use but was frustrated.
The trio believes that recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the urgency of open access to non-financial data. Without it, AI risks being trained with outdated, biased or incomplete information.
Initially, the company focused on working with utility companies, connecting with over 100,000 utility providers in more than 40 countries in North America, Europe and Asia. Customers include EnergyCap, Quadient and Greenly. The deck also works with non-utilities such as Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies. The technology is believed to be applicable to industries where data is “confined” in online accounts.
“Think of it as a bridge between basic tools such as application layers and browser automation, as well as AI operators such as Playwright, browser usage, and Openai operators,” says Leboeuf. “We took the messy and basics — authentication, data normalization, rate limiting, consent management, anti-bot protection — into a seamless, commercialized platform.”
Rapid growth
According to the founder, the deck has seen the number of developers “grow dramatically” on the platform over the past few months. For example, in February, that connection increased by more than 120% compared to the previous month. The startup pricing model is a performance-driven client based on “successful” API calls.
“That means you only pay if your data works,” says Lavoie.
Like plaids and flinks, decks rely solely on explicit user consent to connect and collect data.
“It may hypothetically violate some of the terms, but our technology has driven regulators around the world to clarify that in some jurisdictions that consumers and businesses have the right to access and send data, following the international trends of open data that have become widespread at scale,” Leboeuf said.
The deck also claims to have its own technology to avoid labeling as a bot or crawler. These technologies include several different methods, such as vision computing and human-like mouse movements.
“We see a lot of anti-bot technology in sectors like Telcos and HR, where there are a lot of fraud from identity theft, but many other data verticals are limited without anti-bot technology,” Lavoie said.
For now, we are not using data collection to train our models, instead focusing on building the best way to collect data, rather than building a product on top of the collected data itself.
“We operate in a dual consent environment where end-user consent and deck client consent are required to use the data,” says Leboeuf.
The company will soon launch a data vertical creator. This has led developers to “suppose they can get up and run for data verticals in any industry.
Currently, the deck has 30 employees.
Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing partner of Infinity Ventures, believes the deck is “transforming” the data sector for user authorization.
“The modular platform and reusable recipes provide speed, reliability and adaptability that goes far beyond utilities,” he told TechCrunch. Johnker joined the deck’s board as part of his fundraising.
The unscathed venture also participated in Series A fundraising along with former backers Better Tomorrow Ventures, Golden and Luge Capital.