Why We Invested in Brico

Brico is at an inflection point. Licensing will always be recurring and mission-critical in finance, yet it remains low-margin work that law firms won’t automate for profit. That leaves a significant gap in the market. Brico addresses this opportunity, slashing licensing costs from millions to a fraction. The results are immediate, but the impact is long-term. Because licensing is a gating function on revenue and product launches, removing this friction doesn’t just cut cost, it enables proactive management and meaningfully accelerates roadmaps and market entry. In our view, this is a category-defining compliance infrastructure: AI-native, workflow-deep, and essential to trust in the financial system.

In the year since our first investment, the San-Francisco-based startup has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in fintech, posting 600% year-over-year revenue growth and earning recognition as one of Forbes’ Top 50 FinTechs of 2025. Customers can’t stop singing Brico’s praises. 

We’re fired up to announce that we are leading Brico’s $13.5 million Series A, with participation from fellow existing investors Restive Ventures and Pear VC. By leading this round, we’re bringing not just capital, adding to meaningful cash already on the balance sheet, but a commitment to help co-founders Snigdha Kumar, CEO, and Edward Swiac, CTO, and their team scale as they deepen their go-to-market strategy and reinforce their AI advantage. We believe they are positioned to define the future of compliance infrastructure.

Bringing joy to a joyless task

Snigdha first experienced the drudgery of applying for and maintaining financial licenses as product ops lead at Digit and Opportun. Even though companies often work with law firms in this critical process, the burden of the actual operations rests on them, and, as Snigdha puts it, is completed “without any joy whatsoever.”

And there was huge untapped demand. Larger non-bank providers are known to apply for and maintain hundreds of licenses. Suppose you’re going to operate any money movement business or process any payments in the United States. In that case, you need a money transmitter license (MTL), and if you’re going to have a national customer base, you’re going to need MTLs in at least 45 states. This complexity compounds quickly: new products, new states, and renewals create a constant queue of filings that overwhelms spreadsheets and shared drives.

Companies will even postpone getting a license for a particular financial service because it is time-consuming and costly — for more than 50,000 licensed financial services firms and 25,000 fintech companies, licensing expenses are estimated to be 5-10% of a company’s revenue. And delays aren’t just expensive; they stall revenue and blunt competitive momentum.

Snigdha saw this and had a simple vision: Reduce the pain, complexity, and countless hours from a process that had long held back innovation. This would be accomplished via an AI-powered tool so elegant it would actually do the impossible — bring joy to licensing! Crucially, the product would pair automation with human-in-the-loop compliance experts for accuracy, auditability, and speed.

She partnered with Edward, whose experience building sophisticated B2B solutions at Marqeta would guide Brico’s platform, and they launched Brico in 2023 with a team of senior legal and compliance professionals. That blend of deep regulatory DNA and world-class engineering is rare in compliance and key to Brico’s pace of execution.

We had known Snigdha for over a decade when we first invested in Brico, meeting her during her work in the financial inclusion space. Her experience in leading product at innovative fintechs positioned her well to take on this challenge and we were confident she would be up for the task. Her track record and reputation made it easy for top talent and marquee customers to lean in early.

She and Edward have pulled together a team rich in regulatory, product, and compliance talent. Their sense of urgency, clarity of vision, and ability to attract stellar people have put Brico on a trajectory for scale. We’ve seen that urgency translate into disciplined company-building: fast shipping, tight feedback loops with customers, and focus on the one job that matters — licensing.

An AI-native use case waiting to be solved

It’s obvious that Brico is doing more than solving workflow pain points. It’s building a category-leading, AI-native platform. By automating document ingestion, compliance tracking, and decisioning, Brico is redefining how institutions manage regulatory obligations. More and more, customers treat Brico not as a tool but as core infrastructure. In practice, that means live tracking of state-by-state changes, auto-populated forms, prerequisite checks, and decision support that prevents dead ends and rework.

Since launch, Brico has earned the trust of top-tier companies, including Marqeta, Bilt, BitGo, and Tilt (formerly Empower), which rely on Brico to manage complex, multi-state licensing portfolios spanning money transmitter, lending, collection, mortgage, and even New York BitLicense. Recent wins also include mature, scaled companies — evidence that Brico’s value extends well beyond early-stage fintechs.

Brico’s intelligent platform automates the entire licensing lifecycle from applications to renewals, pairing AI-powered automation with human-in-the-loop compliance experts. Customers complete applications 5x faster, cut licensing costs by up to 90%, and reclaim 75% of their team’s time from tedious tasks like form filling, tracking changes, and managing filings. As a result, licensing shifts from a cost center to a growth enabler, helping teams pull forward launches and enter new markets with confidence.

As competition intensifies across both foundational and application layers of generative AI, highly focused workflow platforms will win. AI-native niche solutions like Brico go deep on one hard problem. That focus builds durable moats. It also lets value compound with each new vertical. We believe this depth — backed by proprietary data, domain models, and process IP — creates a defensible edge that general-purpose tools can’t replicate.

Setting a new standard

The new funding will accelerate Brico’s vision of setting the new standard for licensing compliance. 

It will expand license coverage, launch predictive compliance tools, and expand agentic tooling to handle regulatory workflows. Brico also plans to double its team over the next year to meet surging customer demand. On the go-to-market side, Brico will stand up an outbound motion, deepen channel partnerships (including with law firms that already refer clients), and broaden enterprise pricing to match demonstrated ROI.

We are proud to back Snigdha, Edward, and their growing team as they define the future of compliance infrastructure. Modern compliance infrastructure is a lever for system-wide progress — lower costs, faster innovation, and stronger consumer protection — and Brico is building exactly that.