Fintech app Portabl raises $2.5 million to help consumers store financial data securely • TechCrunch

Fintech Portabl announced the closing of a $2.5 million seed round today led by Harlem Capital Partners. Also launching today is Portabl, founded by Nate Soffio and Alex Yenkalov.

It’s a digital wallet and password manager for financial services and banking apps, but Soffio calls it a financial digital passport, which helps with user identification, making the task less cumbersome for both consumers and financial services. He said the company’s goal is to wean people off passwords, and help consumers gain more ownership over their financial data by providing control over who has access to it.

The app works like this: Portabl stores the information used to access existing financial apps. Every time an app is opened, a Portabl login will pop up and within two clicks allows users to easily log in.

“We recognize the fact that if you’re a consumer, having a say over who has access to your identity and financial life has historically been confusing and cumbersome — at worst, resistive and exclusionary,” Soffio told TechCrunch. “We believe that enabling consumers to own their data, keep it secure and share it for access or updates is the right way to deliver on many of the promises you hear about in open banking.”

Noting the rise of decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, Yenkalov said the industry is closer than ever to enabling financial organizations to take advantage of consumers owning and sharing their own data.

“In a sense, by putting users in charge of their authentic data, Portabl makes them secure APIs for themselves,” he told TechCrunch. “This has enormous potential to transform interactions between consumers and providers in the financial world.”

Calling the fundraising journey “this kind of weird hopscotch situation,” Soffio said he started building the app early last year while attending the Wharton School of Business. In his spare time, he pitched competitions and accelerators. Eventually, he met Yenkalov, who helped him continue to shape the hypothesis for the app. Thanks to a series of warm introductions, the duo managed to start scraping together money and met investors.

Soffio said Portabl chose Harlem Capital to lead the round after a conversation he’ll never forget: Yenkalov, a Ukrainian citizen, was trapped in the country when war with Russia broke out in the middle of a fundraising call with the firm. Soffio remembers air raid sirens going off and said in the first minutes of the conversation that the conversation was not about business, but instead about finding a way to support Yenkalov’s escape from the country.

“It’s a VC firm and their mission is to make big investments,” Soffio said. “They put all that aside and said, ‘Hey, this is a global crisis going on – what else can we do for you?’ For me, it was something to remember forever, honestly.”

Harlem Capital partner Brandon Bryant said what originally drew the fund to Portabl was the idea that identity verification in fintech remains unsolved. “Their platform allows you as a consumer to create your own identity information once and take it with you to every fintech application,” Bryant told TechCrunch. “We believe this will be a major unlock for the industry.”

Carl Vogel, a partner at Sixth Man Ventures who also invested in Portabl’s seed round, expressed similar sentiments. He said the app “realized that creating user-owned financial identities can create tremendous value not only for users, but can also create meaningful product and operational improvements for financial institutions.”

“What also excited us was that Portabl’s solution spans both traditional financial institutions and web3-native companies that want to safely onboard and maintain users,” continued Vogel. “We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Portabl on their journey.”

Soffio said the company plans to use the money to expand its team and accelerate growth. It’s also working on its SOC2 and ISO/IEC 27001 security certifications (the former is a voluntary standard for managing consumer data while the latter is an international rubric for managing information) and is leaning into blockchain to give consumers “bulletproof records of their data .”

As a child, Soffio learned the importance of verifiable identity information. He was born in Colombia and adopted by a Polish mother and a Puerto Rican father, who raised him in Stanford, Connecticut. He describes his neighborhood as primarily immigrant and said there was always an underlying fear and anxiety about having proper documentation.

“I grew up witnessing various types of financial exclusion due to poverty, immigration, cash dependency and a lot of anxiety around documentation and forming relationships with brick-and-mortar banks,” Soffio said. “These are the things that keep otherwise good people excluded from using basic services.”

He studied anthropology during his undergraduate years at Yale and always planned to go to law school. His first job out of university was as a paralegal, where he was tasked with building databases, furthering his love of information retrieval. He then spent a decade working for various software and fintech startups, holding roles focused on product management fraud and anti-money laundering.

He soon realized the connection between data management, identity problems and access to important financial services. From there, he dropped everything, scrapped his law school plans, and went on a journey to learn about identity, which naturally led him to Wharton.

“Historically, a lot of people have been left out of the system, not because they’re bad, but because they’re hard to understand,” he said. “We want to make that a thing of the past by standardizing how both traditional and alternative data can be owned, shared and trusted.”