Company News

Culture

Podcasts

Product Updates

Disclaimer: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Some parts of the conversation may have been condensed, rearranged, or paraphrased to improve comprehension.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Brand and Beyond podcast. I'm your host, Chris joined as always by my co-host Peace, and we have a really, really great episode for all you guys out there today. We are joined by co-founder and CEO of Quiltt, 

. Ruben, Thank you so much for taking the time.

Love that. So, could you give our audience a brief intro of what, what Quiltt does, the size and state that you guys are at, at now, and just really the origin story of how it all got started.

Yeah. So Quiltt is a basically a financial infrastructure company.

Our mission is to lower technical barriers for people building in consumer financial services. You know, we've sort of seen a lot of innovation in this space over the last five to 10 years but kind of one of the core challenges for anyone who wants to build, you know, financial experiences, things like personal finance, things that drive financial wellness and inclusion is you're still sort of like gated by primarily your ability to code.

Or your ability to raise money and hire people who know how to code. And even if you know how to code there's kind of a pretty big gap between getting something really basic out and getting something out of the quality and caliber and data integrity of the Chimes and the large companies today that consumers are increasingly expecting their technology, their financial technology to kind of be of that level.

And so at Quiltt, what we're basically building is a low-code platform that essentially has all these integrations under the hood so you can integrate into Quiltt on the front end with a single line of code and on the backend you don't even need to use your own server if you don't want to.

We can support server-less configurations as well. And then we give you access to best in class providers for account aggregation, account verification, transaction enrichment out of the box. So, essentially it's one integration that turns data from lots of different providers into one kind of standard canonical language.

And the idea really is to allow folks to get to market much faster, allow folks to experiment and try out new providers without having to go through multi-month engineering integration cycles just to get something up and running.

Happy to dive into the origin story as well. That was kinda what the company is today.

So the origin story is kind of, we have a bit of an unusual path to get here. So after college I lived in New York for a while working for a big financial data company. I was on a sort of on a sales management track at a large financial data company. At the same time I did a lot of computer science in high school but didn't do that at all in college.

And a few years in I really kind of got the itch to build stuff. And instead of sell stuff the irony is now I'm probably doing more selling than [building]. But basically my wife and I moved from New York City to Texas where I'm based today. And I was kind of at an inflection point in my career.

I decided to get back into programming a little bit. I had some ideas I wanted to validate and at the time if you wanted to build something in FinTech you just have to code. The technology and the type of tooling available for folks who might have a lot of ideas, but don't necessarily know how to piece all the data pieces of it together into a cohesive customer facing product or experience.

So, I got into coding and, and had a couple of ideas I wanted to play with. One of which led me to build a kind of an automated budgeting app. And the automated budgeting app was built on top of the API from Plaid. So you would connect your bank accounts, and then we would basically automatically build this comprehensive picture of your finances.

From there we would start building some automations around what your needs, your wants, and your goals. And so I brought on my co-founder, he was an old friend of mine, we took a B2B approach and started selling it to community banks and credit unions to add as a white label option so they could better compete with a lot of these fintechs and a lot of the really big banks that are building this kind of stuff in house and are getting good.

But eventually in 2020 we had this eureka moment, which was that more and more folks are trying to build in this space and a lot of the technology is fairly repetitive. And we really were fascinated by the data problem, perhaps more than the customer experience problem.

I also think like the composition of our team at the time was much more suited for this type of a business anyway. And I think that's really important for founders to realize. Find the thing that you're excited about, plus the thing that your early team is good at.

I think that's a really important lesson. It was a lesson for us. And so we ended up basically pivoting the company, rebranded to Quiltt and started basically going down this infrastructure path. So, now we're trying to make it a lot easier for other people to get going with this type of tooling without having to do the integrations.

And it dramatically increases the possibilities of this technology because what people build on it, that final step of it, is really up to the the entrepreneur and the company that has these ideas. We just want do all the dirty, boring plumbing work under the hood.

Absolutely. So what's, what's the size or stage of Quiltt?

So we are seven full-time with a couple of contractors. We raised our seed round at the beginning of last year.

Thank you. So, at this point we just launched our first sort of public product last week called the Quiltt Connector.

We've been in beta for the actual API for a while with a bunch of customers. And so we're sort of I would say from my vantage point, as a technical founder, I'm working hard to kind of switch off a little bit off of builder mode into more of the, let's get this thing out into the hands of people mode.

But yeah that's that's basically the team. There’s seven of us five of us are engineers, so it's a pretty engineering heavy team. And then my co-founder who's the sales and partnership guy. And then we just brought on an amazing head of marketing. She's also sort of plugging a lot of the gaps, other gaps that we have on our team.

I mean, really just getting into the meat & potatoes of the podcast. You and your family are from Armenia. You guys immigrated here. I, myself, also immigrate to the United States from Rwanda with my family. So I know personally, my upbringing, my culture plays a big part on how I engage with my team members and really just my day-to-day.

Can you just tell our audience how has your cultural background influenced how you structured Quiltt’s culture?

That's a really good question. So I think one of the things, at least for me, from my immigrant experience, one of the values I hold pretty intuitively is this ability to or at least an effort to always put myself in the shoes of another person and try to see the world a little bit from the way they see it. Just because I've had to do that as I've moved around the world when I was a kid. And so, one of the things we focused on is really building a team of folks that might not have the most conventional resumes or might not have the most conventional backgrounds, and it can actually bring really different and interesting perspectives to the table.

So, bringing that in, I think, you know, dramatically increases the possibilities of the kind of stuff that your team will come up with and the kind of interactions they'll have.

But I think that also can kind of backfire. I think if you don't have the right culture where people can freely debate, freely discuss, do it respectfully. And so, so the main thing I think for me has been and I learned this probably more so from some old bosses that I've had than my immigrant experience is really bringing on really smart people and doing as much as I possibly can to get out of the way and to allow them to express themselves with their creativity and their professionalism.

I think that's probably the number one sort of hack I, I would give to people. I think as a founder, I think a lot of, particularly product minded founders have a tendency to be really, really in the weeds.

And I'm often guilty of that, but I think just having the awareness of the whole point of hiring really smart people is that over time I need to become kind of expendable and useless, at least from the delivery of the product. Right? And that way I'm able to step into the next thing that my business requires me to do for us to be able to keep this going.

That foundation, were you cognizant of that when you got started? Is this something you had to learn as you guys progressed and move forward?

A little bit of both. I had kind of a good fortune of getting some solid kind of management experience when I was pretty early in my career. So it was at a company called S&P Capital IQ, so the big financial data company we had some kind of merger that happened there. There was some reorganization and basically I found myself as a 26 year old managing a 12 person team. And it was managing, but also building the team and figuring out how they're gonna work.

And, and one of my bosses or the boss at the time who offered me this opportunity had a very unconventional way of offering me this opportunity, which was basically, “Hey, so you have a lot of opinions about this stuff, and you're always kind of complaining about it, so why don't you go fix it?”

I'm like, well, how do I do that? And he goes on, “I don't know, write it out. Like write a piece of paper of what you think should happen and then we'll talk about.” And I was super annoyed about this because I'm like, you're the boss. You're supposed to tell me what my job is. Like, why are you making me do your work?

And so I ended up basically going through and writing probably the longest thing I wrote since college. Just basically bulleted and tried to outline some of the opportunities I saw on the team and some of the things we could improve. And I thought he was just gonna throw it out or whatever but instead we spent an hour and a half digesting.

And, he started layering in context around the organization and some of the issues, some of the reasons for some of these things, some of the things that he totally agreed with. And we walked out of there with an edited version of this that actually became a job description.

And it really changed the way I think I approached that job because I basically helped create the job description. I think in a startup setting it's harder to do that in a formalized way but I think trying to keep that attitude of hire smart people and then have them tell you what needs to happen. Chime in if you have opinions, but then ultimately try to get out of the way and have them do that. I think that's been a probably the simplest management advice that I ever learned. And you know, I think it's been a lot more fun to run a team.

For sure. Wow, that's that's a really interesting way to get handed to the job, I must say. So wanting to transition into how remote work plays a really important role in your culture, in a blog post you said, I recognize that there are many obvious and not so obvious trade offs involved in being fully remote and that for us the pros continue to greatly outweigh the cons. So could you break down that statement, you know, telling our listeners, how do the pros outweigh the cons relative to remote work for you guys?

Yeah, so the big one is just talent availability and access, right? I think that the earlier the startup is, the more the totality of the startup is just the talent on the team.

And, you know, I think hopefully that keeps up over time, but even especially in the early days, it's the number one competitive advantage you have, right? It's like, can you move and how much better are your people than the incumbents people? One way to put it.

So I think the big advantage of remote for us really is the ability to hire the best person from anywhere in the world.

I live in Dallas now, and Dallas has a lot of tech people, and it's a pretty good sort of tech market. But, but at the same time the best person at X is probably not here. They're probably in another part of the world, right? So statistically you just have access to a lot more people.

And I think the biggest advantage you can build as an early stage startup that can't pay Google, that can't out pay these companies, right? You have a bigger universe of people that you might be able to find that might be excited about your team and about your company.

That's part one. And then part two, I think, we're sort of a COVID company in some ways. I think really the current iteration of the company was born during COVID. And so being remote friendly and remote flexible in part was a necessity when we started really building out our core team.

But at the same time it's been really interesting to see how you can have an intense job that can nicely fit in with sort of the lives that people have outside of work. That's not to say that you can't do that if you have to show up at the office at nine o'clock and go home at five o'clock, but the ability for folks to live where they want with their families and a lot of folks on our team have kids being able to be there for your kids when you need to drop 'em off at school, go to a doctor's appointment.

I think that's kind of flexibility that remote work provides to people. Without folks needing to ask permission because they need to like step out for lunch or something, or it being necessarily a visible thing. I think that helps create a type of work culture where people are more personally accountable, but at the same time they're more able to do their best work within confines of our lives, which are increasingly not just nine to five.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So as a follow up to that, what do you think the biggest trade off is from not being in person, in your mind?

The biggest one I think it's the one that a lot of the remote work skeptics talk about.

I think it's the collaboration angle, right? Being able to sit down next to somebody in front of their computer, doing it together in front of a whiteboard. Even step out for coffee to clear your brain. Those are the we're human beings, we're social creatures, I think those type of interactions are really, really hard, if not impossible to in a remote context.

And so, you know, you lose that, right? And so I think you have to make up for that in other ways. For us that's meant being very creative around the way we sort of do these shaping discussions when we're working on feature.

We actually for anything that's meaningful, we will schedule a one and a half to two hours on video, in front of a document with a screen share. And we'll jump through code together. We'll do all these things. I think we would do in person but it seems a little impractical to do over remote, so we're really trying to kind of build that part of it.

And then the second way we've gotten around this is we have the great fortune of travel. And so, in the Fall when we had a bit of a, kind of a eureka moment around a product direction we needed to take I literally got on a plane and I flew to New York where our engineering lead was and, and my co-founder is also there. And we got into a room and we hammered this thing over like a two day period.

Could we have done that remotely? Maybe, but I, I don't think it would've worked nearly as well. So I think you have to pick your battles a little bit and, and sort of have a core flow that supports, and is built around remote.

But I also think you need to be willing and able to kind of break from that and, and just get in, get in the car, get on a plane, like go and actually see the person and hash some of these things out.

Has there been any, like, has there been any like cultural surprises you've dealt with, like with your team being that you, you were in remote, I'm assuming, when you worked at Capital IQ, it was, it, were you in person?

Yeah, so we were in person and when I moved to Dallas, I was briefly kind of remote. We had an office here in Dallas, but it was in a different division. So the company had an office, but none of my direct colleagues were in this office. I found myself much more productive working from home.

So I started doing that, but it was very unusual and I would say that a lot of the more old school folks on my team were not particularly happy with that because it was unusual. And then the flip side of it, I think some of my junior folks that work for me I think in some cases it wasn't a good experience for them either because their boss is not visible or present, right?

Podcast: Brand & Beyond, Quiltt CEO & Co-founder Ruben Izmailyan

At Quiltt, we’re on a mission to dramatically lower technical barriers to innovation in the financial services space. Our platform empowers anyone to quickly connect customer financial data, stitch relevant APIs, and deploy intelligent workflows to bring innovative financial experiences to market.

Today we’re delighted to launch the Quiltt Connector, the industry’s first true “easy button”. The Connector allows teams to - regardless of their engineering bandwidth - onboard customers onto leading account aggregation, transaction enrichment and other financial APIs, with no integration work required.

The global pandemic dramatically accelerated customer adoption of digital financial services - from banking and lending to investing and personal finance - and there is no going back. In turn, we saw an unprecedented increase in new financial data infrastructure. Account aggregation, transaction enrichment, debt repayment, bill management, and others have become highly competitive categories in fintech.

Today’s consumers and businesses increasingly demand that financial experiences they use are reliable, secure and accurately understand their full financial picture. Even traditional financial institutions have caught on, with many boasting feature-rich financial experiences that rival those offered by the most celebrated fintech companies.

startups and established companies have to do more with less

How much engineering bandwidth can we dedicate to standing up and maintaining integrations?

Which data providers should we use today? What about tomorrow? What about data coverage?

What pricing models can we commit to? What if our business model changes?

What happens if a provider pivots, or falls on hard times?

If you’re rich in cash or engineering talent, mistakes can be patched over with more cash and more engineering work. But for most 

For startups, cash is tighter and engineering teams are leaner.

Entrepreneurs and established companies are looking to do more with less.

Traditional financial institutions are being opportunistic, looking to catch up without reinventing the wheel.

, armed with no-code tools and accustomed to accomplishing almost anything are getting in the fray. They demand new ways of building:

New integration approaches capable of breaking through the “API wall”.

Access to the same technologies Silicon Valley companies are leveraging, without access to Silicon Valley engineers.

Native compatibility with no-code tooling from companies like Zapier, Airtable and Retool.

Established financial infrastructure companies are aggressively launching new products and expanding into new markets. Many must meet ambitious late-stage investor expectations, while defending from nimbler upstarts. Meanwhile the upstarts still need to get their products into the hands of customers as painlessly and quickly as possible. Delightfully simple integrations are not a nice to have - they’re now table stakes.

All this in the face of leaner engineering teams, tighter budgets and growing heartburn about building complex and distracting data plumbing in-house.

When the web analytics space reached a similar stage in the mid-2010s, companies like 

 dramatically rethought the model: now instead of writing complex analytics integrations into multiple disparate providers, you could integrate once and let a unified API provider handle the downstream connections to the services you wanted to use. Adding a new data source or destination became a flip of the switch, not a multi-month engineering project, powered by common and standardized data models.

 have started rapidly cutting down integration bottlenecks in their categories, seamlessly connecting eager customers with the data and APIs they need and want to build amazing digital experiences.

What’s most exciting is that these new abstraction layers do not operate in a zero-sum environment. Unified APIs help innovators and providers find each other and dramatically speed time-to-market, effectively pouring gasoline onto their respective ecosystems.

Quiltt’s core product is a unified API for customer financial data. Our data platform leverages a suite of pre-built integrations to best-in-class financial APIs like Plaid, MX and Spade. This allows our clients to instantly access comprehensive financial pictures of their customers, without building and maintaining complex back-end integrations.

By handling all the back-end integration work, we’ve helped our beta customers save countless hours and dollars, freeing their engineers to focus on core product functionality. Historically our clients just needed to integrate with their data provider’s front-end UI module (i.e. Plaid Link) into their product and let us to do the heavy lifting on the back-end.

But as our platform has grown, the most common request we’ve been hearing was to solve the front-end piece of the puzzle as well. Multiple providers means handling multiple widgets, each becoming more feature-rich in its own right, is creating a new form of complexity.

 - a modular, fully embeddable front-end experience for onboarding customers onto the core data platforms we support. The Connector orchestrates and configures the account-linking flows of the infrastructure providers we support, customizable through our no-code, web-based Dashboard. Depending on your use-case, the Connector can even enroll and authenticate new customers for you on the fly.

The Connector is much simpler than how things typically work today:

Grab the Connector URL or a 1-line embed snippet.

Have your lead or customer visit the URL or your website/app.

While we will always support code-based configuration for complex use-cases, there are no API calls, token handshakes or complex configuration objects required!

Fintech’s First “Easy Button” — The Quiltt Connector

We’re thrilled to announce that Jenn Starr has joined Quiltt as our head of marketing!

Jenn has a wealth of experience working with B2B seed-stage companies and is a startup founder herself, with her last startup going through 500 Startups and growing two of her own marketing agencies to acquisition. Jenn has a track record of coming in as a marketing department of one, building successful marketing engines from the ground up and helping define key metrics that have led companies to a successful Series A fundraise.

"Jenn is the rare leader who combines creativity and positivity with an unstoppable drive to execute. She joins Quiltt at an exciting time as we prepare to launch out of beta. I look forward to partnering with her to get our message out to the next wave of builders in fintech." - Ruben Izmailyan, Co-Founder & CEO

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join the Quiltt team. The product is truly remarkable, offering a low-code solution for seamlessly integrating various APIs and customer data to create cutting-edge fintech experiences. I have been consistently impressed by everything at Quiltt, from the product itself to the talented team behind it. The future looks bright for Quiltt and I am excited to be a part of it.” - Jenn Starr

Outside of work, you can find Jenn at the closest MLB park! She lives and breathes baseball and is a die-hard Houston Astros fan. She's currently on a mission to watch a game at all 30 stadiums, and should be halfway through by the end of 2023! When Jenn isn't busy cheering on the Astros, you can find her lifting weights, making cheesecakes, and traveling with her wife and 2 kids.

Please join us in welcoming Jenn to the Quiltt team! You can find her on 

Jenn Starr joins Quiltt as Head of Marketing

Quiltt recently held its second Team Retreat in beautiful Breckenridge, CO. Despite being a small team; we brought together team members from California, New Jersey, New York, Germany, Rhode Island, Texas, and one who is a digital nomad.


Despite having strong opinions on the matter, I try not to pay attention to the incessant social media debates about “remote” vs “in-person” workplaces. Instead, I recognize that there are many obvious (and not-so-obvious) trade-offs involved in being fully remote and that for us the pros continue to greatly outweigh the cons. I also recognize that having painstakingly recruited a team of mature and independent professionals who thrive in a remote environment, one of my most important responsibilities is to create a productive, collaborative, and happy work environment for our team.


While our team members do their best work working on their terms and from their chosen location, it is undeniable that physical interaction is the most universally effective way to create and sustain meaningful relationships built on trust and shared principles. 

For us, this means that a critical element of running an all-remote company is to create time and space for our entire team to gather in one place, in person.

This year, we were coming off our seed raise announcement and had just onboarded several new team members, so we felt a special responsibility to put together a great retreat.

We planned our retreat as a long weekend on the tail end of 

, a fantastic developer-focused fintech conference hosted by the great folks at 

. Organizing our retreat in Colorado had several benefits:

Most of our engineering-heavy team was already in one place.

Denver is home to a major international airport, simplifying travel logistics for everyone.

Colorado is home to some of the most beautiful nature the US has to offer, a relatively short drive away from Denver.

Most of us live in major cities, so the change of scenery, especially for those having spent a stimulating few days attending Fintech DevCon, proved to be both relaxing and invigorating.


We were careful not to over-program the retreat, mixing several team-wide activities with ample amounts of unstructured time for small groups to go on games, hikes, meals, and just hang out.


The overwhelming favorite team-wide activity we did plan was a 4-hour whitewater rafting trip a few towns over. The 90-minute drive through gorgeous mountains, old mining towns, and sprawling farms was a highlight on its own.

Most of us had not rafted before and learned that few things build trust better than a bunch of newbies working together trying not to flip over into the crisp Arkansas river.  Learning to quickly row together in the same direction and away from giant boulders popping up in front of your vessel felt like a pretty appropriate startup bonding activity.

With our 2022 Team Retreat in the books, we feel like a stronger and better-coordinated crew, eagerly awaiting the next one. If you’re interested in joining us, drop us a note at 

Team Retreats and Remote Companies: How We Craft Successful Retreats at Quiltt

It was an exciting November! We’re committed to making Quiltt the best it can be, and we hope you enjoy these new features! If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by filling out the form below.

We’ve launched a brand new documentation site with integration Guides and dedicated Reference pages for Quiltt’s APIs. The new experience is available now at 

To give clients greater visibility into how current an account balance is in Quiltt, we added balance timestamps, which indicate when the balance data was last synced with the upstream aggregation provider. To learn more, see the 

`AccountBalance` type definition in the GraphQL API Reference

We’re excited to announce that Webhooks are now available on the Quiltt platform, allowing clients to subscribe to changes to their user profiles and associated data. To set up a webhook subscription, see our 

Webhooks section of our Admin API Reference

Clients can now filter for users with connections from specific data sources.  For example, you can now filter for users who have a Plaid connection.  Additionally, we’ve significantly improved the search experience, allowing you to quickly search for users by email address, names, and other fields.

November 2022 Product Updates

We are thrilled to announce that Quiltt has raised $4 million in Seed funding!

Greycroft and Newark Venture Partners co-led this round with participation from and includes participation by entities like Motivate Ventures, Abstraction Capital, Tectonic Capital, and Bridge Investments.


As we celebrate this milestone, we want to take a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

We started building Quiltt because we had our own pain points we were trying to solve. Building integrations into open-banking platforms like Plaid is time-consuming. Today Quiltt has integrations with fintech providers like Plaid, Spade, and ApexEdge.

Our platform empowers you to quickly connect customer financial data, stitch relevant APIs, and deploy intelligent workflows to bring innovative financial experiences to market.


With this new funding, we have already started getting to work building out new integrations and working with new partners.


In addition, we are working on building an embeddable bills and subscriptions experience so our customers can build with off-the-shelf, white-label apps.


We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but we’re just getting started. There’s still a lot of work to do to lower barriers in building in fintech, and we’re committed to continuing to improve Quiltt and make it the best platform for building amazing fintech experiences.

Blog

Podcast: Brand & Beyond, Quiltt CEO & Co-founder Ruben Izmailyan

Fintech’s First “Easy Button” — The Quiltt Connector

Jenn Starr joins Quiltt as Head of Marketing

Team Retreats and Remote Companies: How We Craft Successful Retreats at Quiltt

November 2022 Product Updates

Announcing Quiltt’s $4m Seed Funding