US payments start-up Braid winds down operations
Braid, a San Francisco-based consumer payments start-up founded in 2018, has shut down as of September 2023.
Braid shuts down operations
The start-up had built a multi-user financial account where consumers could pool their money, send and request money from people and groups, set up controls and permissions for access, and utilise a debit card to spend pooled funds.
Over the course of five years, Braid managed to raise nearly $10 million in funding from investors and claims to have passed $10 million in monthly payment volumes processed by Q4 2022.
In a blog post, Braid co-founder Amanda Peyton outlines the company’s story from inception to its eventual closure, and attributes the demise of the start-up to a number of different causes, including the turbulent macroeconomic conditions seen at the beginning of 2023.
The “final nail in the coffin”, Peyton describes, is when “a critical third-party informed us that they’d changed their mind on a key technical decision”, right when it had signed a term sheet for a new round of funding.
“This change was going to break all our software,” Peyton writes. “We had two decisions: rebuild over from zero or shut it all down. It didn’t feel right to take additional capital knowing that we’d have to rebuild, again, so we called off the round.”
After winding down all operations, Peyton ran an auction for Braid’s intellectual property (IP), but ended up being the only bidder for it.
“Braid’s second act will be just as tumultuous,” Peyton writes on her blog. “Consumer financial needs change faster than our financial system can evolve to meet them.”
However, she remains optimistic: “There’s an enormous opportunity here to build excellent software that solves a tangible problem, and that’s what makes it worth it to keep going.”
Peyton previously co-founded four other software companies, including Grand St (a marketplace for technology products) which was acquired by Etsy in 2014, as well as Y Combinator-backed start-up MessageParty.
