Plaid Cracked Open Bank Data – Now Someone's Doing It to Utilities

01 /The Concept

Plaid made its name connecting developers to bank accounts. Deck is running the same play on utilities, telecoms, and energy providers – and moving fast.

To make this concrete: imagine someone managing utility bills across multiple properties, each with a different provider. In principle, they'd need to log into several separate provider portals to track what they're spending and when payments are due. If a developer wanted to build an app to consolidate all of that, they'd face a daunting task: negotiate API access with thousands of potential providers – many of which have no API at all – just to support the range of providers their users might have.

Deck solves that problem. Its platform is already integrated with 100,000 providers spanning energy, telecom, internet, water, gas, point-of-sale systems, offline payment processors, marketplaces, and e-commerce platforms.

Developers access all of this through a single, unified Deck API that returns data in a consistent format across all 100,000 sources. The platform operates across three functional layers: historical data retrieval (pulling past usage and billing records for analysis), live connections (maintaining ongoing subscriptions so developers receive updates – new bills, new transactions – as they arrive), and rapid integration tooling (a schema builder that lets developers add any provider not yet in the catalog, so an obscure local utility doesn't become a blocker).

Energy providers make up the largest share of Deck's current integrations, which makes the first two obvious use cases straightforward: bill payment services, and platforms that help businesses analyze and optimize energy costs across multiple locations – offices, factories, data centers – across different energy types.

A third category, popular in Western markets, covers carbon footprint analysis tools for consumers and enterprises tracking emissions tied to their energy consumption.

Deck was founded in 2024, and in that time has connected not only 100,000 providers but providers from 40 countries: roughly 77,000 in the US, 37,000 across Europe, and thousands more in Mexico, Japan, and Indonesia.

Shortly after launching last fall, the company raised CAD $6.2M (approximately $4.5M USD) in its seed round. It has now closed a fresh $12M round just six months later.

02 /Why It Matters

There's a company called Plaid that Visa attempted to acquire in 2020 for $5.3 billion – twice Plaid's valuation at the time. The DOJ blocked the deal. A year later, Plaid raised a new round that valued the company at $13.4 billion. This past April, Plaid raised another $575M at a $6.1 billion valuation – a haircut from its peak, but still an extraordinary outcome for a data connectivity layer.

Plaid did exactly what Deck is doing – except for banks and financial institutions rather than utility providers. Developers of financial apps can access account balances, transactions, and other data from thousands of banks through a single Plaid API, with users' permission. Today more than 12,000 financial institutions are connected to Plaid, 100 million users have authorized third-party services to access their data through it, and the platform processes half a million API requests per day.

Deck's thesis is that the same model applies to energy and utility infrastructure. And there's a technically interesting parallel: when Plaid launched, banks mostly didn't have external APIs either – open banking was not yet a concept. Plaid had to build its own parsing modules to extract data from bank portals on behalf of consenting users.

Deck faces the same landscape: 95% of the providers it connects to have no API. Its solution is an AI system that emulates user behavior in a browser – navigating portals, extracting data, and automatically adapting when a provider redesigns its interface. That's what enables the company to integrate with 100,000 providers at this speed.

The founder acknowledges the legal grey area: "In theory, scraping account data this way could violate certain providers' terms of service. But we believe open data is the direction regulation is heading, and that regulators will ultimately land on our side."

What makes the bet credible is user sentiment. 58% of Americans are open to sharing personal data with third-party services when the use is transparent and clearly beneficial. That's the demand signal. And it points far beyond utilities.

Crosshatch ([covered here](/review/shapochki-iz-folgi-vyhodjat-iz-mody-teper-nuzhno-vot-takoe)), which raised $2.7M, has built a permission layer that lets users authorize apps to pull data from Google Maps, Instagram, and other services. A travel booking app using Crosshatch might surface destination suggestions based on the locations you've been browsing in Instagram and the places you've visited in your Maps history – without asking you to fill out a single filter.

03 /Opportunities

The underlying trend is straightforward: users are increasingly comfortable sharing their data across services, provided the exchange is transparent and the benefit is tangible. The barrier isn't consent – it's infrastructure.

Most providers still have no external API. And even for those that do, every developer maintaining direct integrations with dozens or hundreds of data sources faces an unsustainable maintenance burden. The value of a single aggregation layer is that developers maintain one integration – to the aggregator – while the aggregator absorbs the complexity of the underlying ecosystem.

That's the Plaid model, and it applies cleanly wherever data is fragmented across many providers. The opportunity is building "Plaid for X" in verticals where no such aggregator yet exists.

The strategic logic has a sharp edge on both sides. On the upside: once you've built X integrations that Y developers depend on, dislodging you becomes extremely difficult. Every new integration and every new developer strengthens your moat – this is a classic flywheel business.

On the downside: the flywheel only spins if you move first and fast. A competitor who reaches critical integration mass before you is nearly impossible to displace.

If this direction interests you, now is the time to move.