I’m always saying that we have a super interesting fintech cluster here in town. Thanks, in part, to the diaspora from early challenger banks like Simple. And a recent hire — by a company helmed by one of the cofounders of Simple — lends credence to that assertion. You see, Chris Chen, formerly CTO of Wyre, has joined Sila as CTO.
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Listen as Portland’s Shamir Karkal, cofounder of fintech startup Sila and cofounder of Simple, discusses the current state of fintech with Nasdaq.
We don’t make a big deal of it, but Oregon punches above its weight for innovative fintech expertise. From the Simple diaspora to current players like Bumped, Expensify, and Sila, there are a lot of local folks rethinking finance and the infrastructure that runs it. And it’s always nice when other regions recognize how compelling that talent is. Like Lincoln Savings Bank which has recently hired former Simple exec and Seed cofounder Ryan Hildebrand to head up innovation.
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In case you haven’t been tracking, former Simple cofounder Shamir Karkal has been quietly building another fintech startup here in Portland. But after today, it might not be “quietly” much longer. You see, that company, Sila, just raised $13 million.
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Sila, a Portland fintech startup that provides an API and SDK that enable app developers to incorporate financial transaction functionality into the solutions they’re building, has partnered with Constitution Lending to help improve their real estate lending capabilities.
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Remember products like Adium and FriendFeed? What about Google Reader? You know, things that were designed to simplify your life by bringing a bunch of disparate information streams into a single interface? Now a new service from a Portland fintech startup is taking that kind of thinking to banking. Meet BankShift.
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The once flourishing Portland startup fintech community has had some unfortunate setbacks, as of late. Acorns, Simple, and Azlo are no longer here. And while companies like Expensify and Bumped continue to grow, we haven’t seen a great deal of activity of up and comers, lately. Until now. Created by startup fintech veterans with more than 60 years experience as a team, we now have a new Portland fintech startup to watch: quin.
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Earlier today, Portland’s Simple — one of the companies that helped inform this generation of the Portland startup community — announced that they were shutting down. But unfortunately, they’re not the only Portland fintech affected by the BBVA USA sale to PNC. Azlo — often referred to as “Simple for business banking” — which also has a significant Portland presence and was part of the BBVA-PNC deal, is being shut down, too.
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Since its inception, Portland Startup Week has been all about supporting a variety of self organized events that celebrate the Portland startup community. But in the four years of organizing the event, we’ve never had something quite the scope of Finnovation PDX, an absolutely free — food, drink, and swag — half day celebration of the FinTech community in the Rose City.
In case you haven’t noticed, Portland has more than its fair share of interesting regional offices — often established through acquisition. There are the obvious ones. Like AWS (via Elemental). And ebay (via Critical Path). And Akamai (via Janrain).
