Buzzy $2.7 billion fintech Plaid is making its first major acquisition to expand into the wealth management space

Plaid

Plaid cofounders William Hockey (left) and Zach Perret.

• Buzzy fin tech company Plaid said on Tuesday it's buying competitor Quovo to break into the wealth management space.
• It's the first major acquisition for Plaid, which has recently been valued at around $2.7 billion in its latest funding round.

One of the hottest fin tech companies in Silicon Valley is inking its first big acquisition.

Buzzy fin tech Plaid said on Tuesday it plans to acquire competitor Quovo, a market platform providing wealth and brokerage data. The deal is the company's first major acquisition and will help Plaid expand into the wealth market and lending space.

Based in San Francisco, Plaid provides API software to connect customers' bank accounts with fin-tech apps like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase and Acorns.

Quovo, a New York-based startup, provides services in investment and brokerage aggregation that have been adopted by a slew of companies in the wealth management space, from upstart roboadvisers like Betterment and Wealthfront to student loan financing firm SoFi to household-name wealth managers like Vanguard and John Hancock.

The deal will allow Plaid, founded by by William Hockey and Zachary Perret in 2013, to expand its offering beyond primarily connecting finance apps to customers' checking and savings accounts. Quovo has wealth and brokerage data from over 14,000 institutions.

"Quovo has built the leading platform for investment and brokerage aggregation, used by many of the biggest names in wealth management," Plaid co-founders Zach Perret and William Hockey wrote in a blog post on the company's website. "We'll build a single platform that developers and large companies alike can use to build any financial application - from payments to lending to wealth management."

The price Plaid would pay to acquire Quovo was not disclosed, but Bloomberg reported the deal was worth $200 million after performance bonuses, citing three anonymous sources.

A spokesperson for Plaid declined to comment on the terms of the deal.

The acquisition comes months after Plaid's latest fundraising: the Silicon Valley firm raised $250 million at a roughly $2.7 billion valuation in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker, along with new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures and former backers Goldman Sachs, NEA and Spark Capital.

In October, Plaid had told investors it was on track to generate roughly $70 million over the next 12 months, Business Insider reported. The estimate was a $20 million increase from what the company had told investors to expect just a month earlier.

Last fall, Plaid also inked a deal with JPMorgan to access the global banks' customer data. In doing so, the bank was able to offer a feature on Chase bank accounts allowing customers to see which applications were using their data, and if they wanted to share it or not.