Finch Raises $40M to Grow Employment API

Finch has raised $40 million in a Series B round to grow its employment application programming interface (API).

The firm will use the new capital to extend the API’s coverage to more systems, expand into new employment data verticals, and add to its engineering product and success teams, Finch said in a Wednesday (Feb. 22) press release.

“Backed by investors we trust, who are fully aligned with our mission to bring deeper connectivity and broader coverage to the realm of employment data and payroll/benefit operations, we look forward to continuing to accelerate Finch’s momentum as we revolutionize the global employment ecosystem,” Finch CEO Jeremy Zhang said in the release.

These moves will expand the capabilities and usage of its API that enables access to organization-wide directory, payroll and benefits data across payroll, human resource information system (HRIS) and benefits systems, according to the press release.

The latest funding round comes eight months after Finch’s $15 million Series A and was led by existing investors General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures.

“As early backers of Stripe and Gusto, we have come to appreciate the importance of FinTech infrastructure as well as the evolving nature and use cases around employment data,” General Catalyst Managing Director Alex Tran said in the release. “We’re excited to see Finch innovating at the intersection of two areas we care a lot about.”

Use cases around employment data include corporate financial management, lending and insurance underwriting, and benefits procurement, Zhang told PYMNTS in an interview posted in 2020.

The digitization of payroll data has the potential to optimize existing workflows and promote the development of new ones, Zhang said at the time.

“We went back and spoke with payroll providers and HR [human resources] systems, and realized how difficult it was to pull data out of these systems, especially in a standardized fashion,” Zhang said when speaking of Finch’s founding. “It requires a lot of technical integration effort.”

Payroll data, along with other information from human resources systems, can be instrumental for identifying workforce risks, employment trends, or gaps and weaknesses in the talent pool, John LaMancuso, who was then CEO of PrimePay, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in 2021.

“Today’s business intelligence tools can extract significant amounts of predictive data to not only forecast but also to plan and develop models for growth or optimizing organizations,” LaMancuso said at the time.