All hail the (eventual) Plaid IPO | TechCrunch

News that fintech startup Plaid hired a CFO has kicked off a round of “when will it go public” chatter. The answer is not soon, something that we can infer from the fact that it only just hired a CFO. Still, hiring C-suite financial talent is a known step on the well-trod path from private startup to public company.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

What’s fun about Plaid is that the company has had an interesting life thus far. Its erstwhile deal to sell itself to Visa back in 2020 affixed a $5.3 billion price tag to the concern (including earn-outs), before that transaction zeroed itself out.

Next, Plaid raised a mountain of capital. Locking in a $425 million Series D in April 2021, Plaid was suddenly worth around $13.4 billion. That’s quite the valuation step-up.

But like many fintech startups that raised big rounds in 2021, Plaid later had to slow down a little. Layoffs of around 20% of its staff in 2022 were enacted, presenting a slimmer Plaid this year. At the time, Plaid CEO Zack Perret wrote the following to his team (emphasis added):

The simple reality is that due to these macroeconomic changes, our pace of cost growth outstripped our pace of revenue growth. I made the decision to hire and invest ahead of revenue growth, and the current economic slowdown has meant that this revenue growth did not materialize as quickly as expected.