Our Investment in Brico: Bringing Joy to the Financial Licensing Process 

We are very excited to announce our investment in Brico. We join Pear Ventures, Cambrian Ventures and Restive Ventures in an $8.1 million seed round to help the business meet the demands of its rapidly growing customer base.

Founded in 2023 by Snigdha Kumar and Edward Swiac, Brico serves financial institutions and fintechs that must apply for and maintain licenses of all types at the state and federal levels. For a tenth of the cost of what it takes today to obtain licenses, Brico offers a software solution that allows license applicants to manage the entire license process, renew licenses, and maintain license needs. 

Brico was born out of Snigdha’s personal experience applying for and maintaining licenses as a product lead, first at Digit and then at Opportun where she had senior product roles. While financial institutions often work with law firms for their license process, the burden of managing the operations of the licensing process falls on the applicant. The task is cumbersome, painful, and, as Snigdha observes, "without any joy whatsoever.” She has known many colleagues and customers to either quit a job at some point in their career – or wish they did – burdened by the challenges of licensing.

As the market for financial services firms grows, so does the overall volume of licenses. Larger non-bank providers are known to apply for and maintain hundreds of licenses. License categories include money transfer, lending, mortgage, insurance, securities, debt collection, brokerage, digital assets, earned wage access, areas of consumer finance, and more. For example, to operate any money movement business or process any payments in the US, you need a money transmitter license (MTL), and to have national coverage, most companies need MTLs in at least 45 states. 

The area has been ripe for fit-for-purpose specialized workflow software. Often companies will postpone getting a license for a particular financial service because it is both time-consuming and costly, capping their overall revenue potential. 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. 

Brico has impressive traction for an 11-month-old startup

The founding team has moved super fast, both at shipping products and securing customers. Edward’s experience building sophisticated B2B solutions at Marqeta and Snigdha’s intimate knowledge of the license workflow has meant fast turnaround times on the solution. The company also has several senior legal and regulatory professionals providing guidance and support, including their own head of compliance. 

Brico’s solution supports three licensing categories already: money transfer, lending, and mortgage. Broker-dealer and insurance are on the immediate roadmap. The solution aims to work across the license lifecycle: new license application, licensing maintenance, audit & exam, and compliance monitoring

The product offers automated data extraction capabilities, allowing Brico to integrate into a company’s internal systems via API to extract information relevant for licensing or process via a data dump. It also features a workflow and collaboration tool with a reminder system, robotic process automation-supported form filing, and real-time data synchronization with regulatory websites. 

The company has already secured 20 paying customers from early-stage start-ups to publicly listed companies One lending institution has achieved significant efficiencies with Brico's licensing solution. Specifically, it experienced a 30% cost reduction and automated 80% of its processes. Another large-scale vertical SaaS provider has moved up its payments offering on its roadmap after it decided to partner with Brico. 

We have known Snigdha for almost a decade across different chapters of her career and feel privileged that we can be part of her journey here. We are excited to back a leader in the financial innovation space. Brico is also part of our thesis and commitment to strengthening the compliance and anti-fraud stack in financial services in keeping with our principles to make the financial systems safe and fair for all.