Plaid Inc.
Founders
Zachary Perret, William Hockey · Founded 2013 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States
Plaid was founded by Zachary Perret, William Hockey in 2013. It is now led by Zach Perret.
Zach Perret and William Hockey met as consultants at Bain & Company. In 2012-2013 they tried to build a personal-finance app and found that getting transaction data out of banks was the hard part. They dropped the app and built that data layer as a product. Plaid launched in 2013 and won early customers such as Venmo.
Zach Perret studied at Duke University and worked as a consultant at Bain & Company before co-founding Plaid in 2013.
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. He has led the company since 2013, through its shift from screen scraping to direct bank APIs, the abandoned $5.3 billion Visa acquisition in 2020-2021, and its growth to more than $500 million in ARR by 2025. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
William Hockey studied at Emory University and worked at Bain & Company before co-founding Plaid.
William Hockey co-founded Plaid in 2013 and served as its president, focusing on engineering and product. He left Plaid in 2021 and co-founded Column, a nationally chartered bank built for developers. William Hockey was born in 1989.
Zach Perret
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
As Co-Founder and CEO, he navigated the massive, highly publicized antitrust collapse of the $5.3 billion Visa acquisition, successfully pivoting the company to raise capital at an astonishing $13.4 billion valuation shortly after.
William Hockey
Co-Founder & former President
As Co-Founder and former CTO, he built the technical foundation that allowed Plaid to completely monopolize the fintech data aggregation space before stepping down in 2019 to launch his own bank (Column).
Plaid was founded in early 2013 in San Francisco, California, by two Duke University alumni: Zachary Perret and William Hockey.
In 2012, Perret and Hockey attempted to build consumer personal finance and budgeting software (such as 'Rambler'). However, they spent 90% of their time writing messy code to connect to bank accounts, recognizing that the lack of bank APIs was the real problem facing all fintech developers.
Operating out of a small San Francisco apartment in 2013, William Hockey spent months reverse-engineering online banking protocols, writing custom automated scrapers and API parsers for hundreds of regional credit unions and banks, building the initial Plaid API.
In 2013, Plaid won the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt New York Hackathon, showcasing their clean bank API that enabled developers to connect bank accounts with just a few lines of code, sparking large interest from Silicon Valley startups.
Plaid raised a $2.8 million seed round in 2013 led by Spark Capital, followed by a $12.5 million Series A in 2014 led by NEA (Rick Yang) with participation from BoxGroup and prominent fintech angel investors.
In January 2019, the founders orchestrated the $200 million acquisition of Quovo, a major financial data platform specializing in investment, brokerage, and wealth management account aggregation, consolidating Plaid's dominance across all asset classes.
The founders designed Plaid Link with three core principles: 1) Drop-in modular simplicity for developers; 2) Bank-grade AES-256 and TLS encryption; and 3) Intuitive, trustworthy mobile-first user experience for consumers.
Zachary Perret and William Hockey built the foundational infrastructure that enabled the entire 2010s-2020s fintech boom, allowing thousands of major apps like Venmo, Robinhood, Chime, and Coinbase to launch and scale smoothly.
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