{"id":27002,"date":"2025-04-17T08:05:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T08:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/27002\/"},"modified":"2025-04-17T08:05:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T08:05:10","slug":"deck-raises-12m-to-plaid-ify-any-website-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/27002\/","title":{"rendered":"Deck raises $12M to ‘Plaid-ify’ any website using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deck, a startup that claims to be building \u201cthe Plaid for the rest of the internet,\u201d has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round \u2014 about nine months after closing its seed financing<\/a>, it tells TechCrunch exclusively.<\/p>\n

The new raise, led by Infinity Ventures, brings Montreal-based Deck\u2019s total raised since its January 2024 inception to $16.5 million. Golden Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures co-led its seed raise.<\/p>\n

Deck<\/a> claims that it is building the infrastructure for user-permissioned data access \u2014 across the entire internet. Its browser-based data agents \u201cunlock\u201d the data from any website through automation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To put it more simply, Deck helps users connect any account online and aims to turn the information into structured, usable data, with full user permission.<\/p>\n

President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert (pictured above, left to right) co-founded <\/strong>Deck in June 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The startup\u2019s approach is to treat the web itself as an open platform. It operates under the premise that users have \u201ctons of valuable data\u201d locked behind usernames, passwords, and session-based portals with no real way to share it securely.<\/p>\n

Deck hopes to change that.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust like Plaid gave developers an easy, secure way to access bank account data with user permission, Deck does the same for the 95% of platforms that don\u2019t offer APIs such as utility portals, e-commerce backends, payroll systems and government services,\u201d Leboeuf told TechCrunch. Its goal is to make it easier for developers to access the data users already have without all the manual work<\/p>\n

When a user connects an account, Deck\u2019s infrastructure handles everything behind the scenes. Its AI agents log in, navigate, and extract the data \u201cjust like a human would \u2014 but faster, more reliably, and at scale,\u201d said Leboeuf.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It then generates scripts to keep those connections live and reusable without AI involvement going forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies use Deck to eliminate the friction of getting their user data from places where APIs don\u2019t exist \u2014 or are incomplete, expensive, or unreliable,\u201d Leboeuf said. \u201cWe basically \u2018Plaid-ify\u2019 any websites. Whether you\u2019re doing accounting, KYC, automating reporting, or verifying a business, Deck lets you build those features in minutes instead of months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Repeat founders<\/p>\n

Leboeuf and Lavoie previously started Flinks, a startup that was dubbed the \u201cPlaid for Canada.\u201d The National Bank of Canada acquired it in 2021 for about US$140 million. (Lambert was one of Flinks\u2019 first engineers.)<\/p>\n

After that sale, the founders started talking to entrepreneurs across industries.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgain and again, we heard the same thing: Our data is broken,\u2019\u201d said Leboeuf.<\/p>\n

One founder had millions in food sales intelligence trapped in dozens of \u201cclunky\u201d distributor portals. Another spent months trying to access music royalty data \u2014 to help users claim over a billion in unpaid royalties.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe even experienced the problem firsthand,\u201d Lavoie said. \u201cThe pattern was clear: data access was fragmented, fragile, and failing \u2014 and not just in banking. It was everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

So they built Deck, which today competes with Arcadia<\/a>, a company that the founders had tried using but grew frustrated by.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The trio believes that recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have underscored the urgency of open access to non-financial data. Without it, AI risks being trained on outdated, biased, or incomplete information.<\/p>\n

Initially, the company has been focused on working with utility companies, having connected to over 100,000 utility providers in more than 40 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia. Customers include EnergyCAP<\/a>, Quadient<\/a>, and Greenly<\/a>. Deck is also working with non-utility customers such as Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies. It believes that its technology can be applied to any industry where data is \u201ctrapped\u201d in online accounts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of us as the bridge between the application layer and foundational tools like browser automation or AI operators such as Playwright, Browser Use, OpenAI Operator,\u201d Leboeuf said. \u201cWe\u2019ve taken the messy, foundational pieces \u2014 authentication, data normalization, rate limiting, consent management, and antibot protection \u2014 and turned them into a seamless, productized platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rapid growth<\/p>\n

Deck has seen the number of developers building on its platform \u201cgrow drastically\u201d in the last couple of months, according to its founders. In February, for example, its connections grew by over 120% compared to the previous month. The startup\u2019s pricing model is performance-driven, charging clients based on \u201csuccessful\u201d API calls.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat means you only pay when the data works,\u201d said Lavoie.<\/p>\n

Like Plaid and Flinks, Deck relies only on explicit user consent to connect and collect data.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile it may hypothetically be violating some terms and conditions, our technology follows the open data international trend that was initiated and greatly popularized by open banking, and has pushed regulators across the world to make it clear in several jurisdictions that consumers and businesses have the right to access and transfer their data,\u201d said Leboeuf.<\/p>\n

Deck also claims to have proprietary technologies to avoid being labeled as bots or crawlers. Those technologies include several different methods, such as vision computing and human-like mouse movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile we see a lot of antibot technologies in sectors like telcos or HR, where there is a lot of fraud from identity theft, lots of other data verticals have limited to no antibot technologies,\u201d said Lavoie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For now, it\u2019s not using the data collection to train models, instead focusing on building the best way to collect the data rather than building products on top of the collected data itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe operate in a dual consent environment, where we would need end-user consent, and Deck\u2019s client consent, to use the data,\u201d Leboeuf said.<\/p>\n

The company soon plans to launch a data vertical creator<\/a>, which it claims will let any developer \u201cget up and running for any data verticals for any industry\u2026 in no time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Presently, Deck has 30 employees.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, believes that Deck is \u201ctransforming\u201d the user-permissioned data sector, \u201cjust as open banking reshaped financial data.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a modular platform and reusable recipes, they deliver speed, reliability, and adaptability that extend well beyond utilities,\u201d he told TechCrunch. Jonker has joined Deck\u2019s board as part of the financing.<\/p>\n

Intact Ventures, along with previous backers Better Tomorrow Ventures, Golden, and Luge Capital also participated in the Series A financing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deck, a startup that claims to be building \u201cthe Plaid for the rest of the internet,\u201d has raised…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,16416,16417,53,16,15],"class_list":["post-27002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-deck","tag-infinity-ventures","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114352273705616995","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}