Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing, Sacra

Sacra

Private Markets, Angel and Secondary Investing

Bringing transparency to private markets so investors, founders, and employees can build on conviction. Sacra delivers deeply researched insights on the private companies shaping tomorrow's markets. By surfacing the data, context, and operator perspective that are missing from private markets today, we help secondary buyers and sellers price equity accurately and unlock liquidity for the people building these businesses.

Private Capital Markets

<ul><li>Many of Plaid’s biggest consumer fintech customers contracted or decelerated circa 2021 to 2023—from Robinhood ($1.82B to $1.36B revenue, down 25%) to Coinbase ($7.84B to $3.11B, down 60%) to Affirm (71% YoY growth to 18% YoY growth)—which combined with competition from data aggregators like Finicity, MX, and Stripe (Financial Connections) &amp; from banks launching direct APIs—directly impacted Plaid’s usage-based model and drove its revenue deceleration from 56% YoY growth (2020) to 12% YoY (2023).</li><li>Plaid’s reacceleration over the last two years, with Sacra estimating that the company hit $546M in ARR in 2025, up 40% YoY from $390M in 2024 (up 27% YoY), has come as Plaid has layered on enterprise accounts (Carvana, Rocket Mortgage, H&amp;R Block), which drive more reliable, higher-volume usage while also being more likely to adopt 2+ products from across Plaid’s suite of new SaaS products for fraud detection (Plaid Protect), credit underwriting (Plaid Check), predicting return risk (Plaid Signal), KYC (Plaid Identity), and instant onboarding (Plaid Layer), with these new products crossing 20% of ARR in 2024 and growing ~90% annually, helping flip Plaid from a ~$50M operating loss in 2024 to full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2025 on ~80% gross margins.</li><li>After its $13.4B peak valuation reset to $6.1B in April 2025 amid 12% growth in 2023, Plaid is now back on an IPO path at an $8B valuation, with the key question whether fraud, credit, and payments can transform the business from the leader on bank connections into a broader financial infrastructure platform with a more diversified revenue base, lower exposure to fintech volume cycles and faster multiproduct growth, where its data network builds a compounding advantage.</li></ul>

Many of Plaid’s biggest consumer fintech customers contracted or decelerated circa 2021 to 2023—from Robinhood ($1.82B to $1.36B revenue, down 25%) to Coinbase ($7.84B to $3.11B, down 60%) to Affirm (71% YoY growth to 18% YoY growth)—which combined with competition from data aggregators like Finicity, MX, and Stripe (Financial Connections) &amp; from banks launching direct APIs—directly impacted Plaid’s usage-based model and drove its revenue deceleration from 56% YoY growth (2020) to 12% YoY (2023).Plaid’s reacceleration over the last two years, with Sacra estimating that the company hit $546M in ARR in 2025, up 40% YoY from $390M in 2024 (up 27% YoY), has come as Plaid has layered on enterprise accounts (Carvana, Rocket Mortgage, H&amp;R Block), which drive more reliable, higher-volume usage while also being more likely to adopt 2+ products from across Plaid’s suite of new SaaS products for fraud detection (Plaid Protect), credit underwriting (Plaid Check), predicting return risk (Plaid Signal), KYC (Plaid Identity), and instant onboarding (Plaid Layer), with these new products crossing 20% of ARR in 2024 and growing ~90% annually, helping flip Plaid from a ~$50M operating loss in 2024 to full-year adjusted EBITDA profitability in 2025 on ~80% gross margins.After its $13.4B peak valuation reset to $6.1B in April 2025 amid 12% growth in 2023, Plaid is now back on an IPO path at an $8B valuation, with the key question whether fraud, credit, and payments can transform the business from the leader on bank connections into a broader financial infrastructure platform with a more diversified revenue base, lower exposure to fintech volume cycles and faster multiproduct growth, where its data network builds a compounding advantage.

<ul><li>Brex’s $5.15B sale to Capital One reflects both its post-2023 comeback, exiting on the upswing (re-accelerating growth to 50% YoY at $700M in annualized revenue and nearing cash-flow positive)</li><li>Last Thursday, Capital One (NYSE: COF) announced it was acquiring Brex ($700M annualized revenue, August 2025) for $5.15B in the largest bank-fintech deal in history.</li><li>In 2024, Brex began to re-accelerate while cutting headcount and getting close to cash-flow positive, engineering a rarely-seen smile growth curve, hitting 37% YoY at $562M in annualized revenue in 2024 and then 50% YoY at $700M in annualized revenue in August 2025 after rewiring its go-to-market by adding embedded fintech as a channel and driving distribution for its cards through enterprise partners like Sabre (travel), Coupa (procurement), Navan (travel) &amp; Fifth Third Bank (commercial banking).</li></ul>

Brex’s $5.15B sale to Capital One reflects both its post-2023 comeback, exiting on the upswing (re-accelerating growth to 50% YoY at $700M in annualized revenue and nearing cash-flow positive)Last Thursday, Capital One (NYSE: COF) announced it was acquiring Brex ($700M annualized revenue, August 2025) for $5.15B in the largest bank-fintech deal in history.In 2024, Brex began to re-accelerate while cutting headcount and getting close to cash-flow positive, engineering a rarely-seen smile growth curve, hitting 37% YoY at $562M in annualized revenue in 2024 and then 50% YoY at $700M in annualized revenue in August 2025 after rewiring its go-to-market by adding embedded fintech as a channel and driving distribution for its cards through enterprise partners like Sabre (travel), Coupa (procurement), Navan (travel) &amp; Fifth Third Bank (commercial banking).

<ul><li>We recently caught up with Noel to discuss Augment's growth to now $750M in AUM and its vision for building the Robinhood for private markets.</li><li>Matching marketplaces still see ~50% of deals fail due to company ROFRs, transfer restrictions, and non-responsive issuers, pushing platforms toward a principal-trading model where they buy shares directly from sellers, warehouse them in SPVs, and resell slices to investors with instant settlement, no company approval, and retail-accessible minimums.</li><li>Consolidation by big banks and wealth management platforms—Morgan Stanley acquiring EquityZen, Charles Schwab acquiring Forge, and Goldman Sachs acquiring Industry Ventures—brings more participants into the ecosystem and creates an opening for those that stay independent to build direct-to-consumer brands and serve the broader retail market.</li></ul>

We recently caught up with Noel to discuss Augment's growth to now $750M in AUM and its vision for building the Robinhood for private markets.Matching marketplaces still see ~50% of deals fail due to company ROFRs, transfer restrictions, and non-responsive issuers, pushing platforms toward a principal-trading model where they buy shares directly from sellers, warehouse them in SPVs, and resell slices to investors with instant settlement, no company approval, and retail-accessible minimums.Consolidation by big banks and wealth management platforms—Morgan Stanley acquiring EquityZen, Charles Schwab acquiring Forge, and Goldman Sachs acquiring Industry Ventures—brings more participants into the ecosystem and creates an opening for those that stay independent to build direct-to-consumer brands and serve the broader retail market.

Noel Moldvai, CEO Of Augment, On Building The Robinhood For Private Markets

<ul><li>Stripe's $1B acquisition of Metronome follows its strategy of building high-margin software on top of payments, this time vertically integrating metering to own the billing stack for AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that need to ingest millions of usage events per second.</li><li>Stripe's acquisition of Metronome for ~$1B in December 2025 gives it a fully-featured usage-based billing offering, already in use by top AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic & Databricks, that it can bundle into Stripe Billing & vertically integrate with payments versus upstart metering platforms like Orb ($44M raised, Menlo Ventures), Lago ($34M raised, FirstMark) & Sequence ($19M raised, A16Z).</li><li>As subscription emerged as the dominant business model for cloud SaaS, recurring billing platforms like Zuora (founded 2007, IPO 2018, taken private by Silver Lake/GIC in 2024), Chargebee (founded 2011, $469M raised) and Recurly (founded 2009, $39M raised) emerged to handle the key challenges with recurring billing including proration, dunning & payment retries, invoicing, and revenue recognition.</li></ul>

Stripe's $1B acquisition of Metronome follows its strategy of building high-margin software on top of payments, this time vertically integrating metering to own the billing stack for AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that need to ingest millions of usage events per second.Stripe's acquisition of Metronome for ~$1B in December 2025 gives it a fully-featured usage-based billing offering, already in use by top AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic & Databricks, that it can bundle into Stripe Billing & vertically integrate with payments versus upstart metering platforms like Orb ($44M raised, Menlo Ventures), Lago ($34M raised, FirstMark) & Sequence ($19M raised, A16Z).As subscription emerged as the dominant business model for cloud SaaS, recurring billing platforms like Zuora (founded 2007, IPO 2018, taken private by Silver Lake/GIC in 2024), Chargebee (founded 2011, $469M raised) and Recurly (founded 2009, $39M raised) emerged to handle the key challenges with recurring billing including proration, dunning & payment retries, invoicing, and revenue recognition.

<ul><li>High customer acquisition costs combined with an adverse selection problem doomed Pipe’s direct-to-SMB model, with riskier businesses most likely to self-select into revenue-based financing, creating unsustainable unit economics.</li><li>With Square Banking & QuickBooks Capital veteran Luke Voiles taking over as CEO in 2023, Pipe has shifted to an embedded fintech model, selling capital, cards, and expense management as white-labeled products inside vertical SaaS platforms & marketplaces like Housecall Pro & Uber Eats—giving Pipe distribution into millions of merchants in return for sharing economics on loan & interchange revenue.</li><li>Attach of existing customers to embedded finance products drives the revenue opportunity, with the benchmark of achieving first-party attach rates of a vertically integrated model like Square’s by making the UI and experience feel deeply native to match owned-channel performance.</li></ul>

High customer acquisition costs combined with an adverse selection problem doomed Pipe’s direct-to-SMB model, with riskier businesses most likely to self-select into revenue-based financing, creating unsustainable unit economics.With Square Banking & QuickBooks Capital veteran Luke Voiles taking over as CEO in 2023, Pipe has shifted to an embedded fintech model, selling capital, cards, and expense management as white-labeled products inside vertical SaaS platforms & marketplaces like Housecall Pro & Uber Eats—giving Pipe distribution into millions of merchants in return for sharing economics on loan & interchange revenue.Attach of existing customers to embedded finance products drives the revenue opportunity, with the benchmark of achieving first-party attach rates of a vertically integrated model like Square’s by making the UI and experience feel deeply native to match owned-channel performance.

Amy Loh, CMO Of Pipe, On Pipe's Next Act As Embedded Fintech

United States

API for fintechs to access and enrich consumer-permissioned bank account data

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Plaid (PLAID US)

Plaid At $546M ARR Growing 40% YoY

TL;DR: As consumer fintechs contracted & slowed between 2021 and 2023, Plaid’s usage-based core business slowed to 12% growth. Once it recovered,...

Sacra

Why Brex Sold To Capital One

TL;DR: Brex’s $5.15B sale to Capital One reflects both its post-2023 comeback, exiting on the upswing (re-accelerating growth to 50% YoY at $700M...

Sacra

Noel Moldvai, CEO Of Augment, On Building The Robinhood For Private Markets

You were just starting Augment in the early stages when we last spoke in 2023. Can you talk us through the last two years and what the key...

Sacra

Why Stripe Bought Metronome

TL;DR: Stripe's $1B acquisition of Metronome follows its strategy of building high-margin software on top of payments, this time vertically...

Sacra

Amy Loh, CMO Of Pipe, On Pipe's Next Act As Embedded Fintech

Can you describe the landscape of financing for small businesses? Our market map includes traditional lending, bank loans, venture debt, and...

Sacra

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