Founded by two 19-year-old dropouts in 2020, Slash has pivoted from sneaker resellers to banking, and just crossed the $1 billion mark for the first time.
Slash Financial Inc. the San Francisco banking platform that started life selling virtual cards to sneaker resellers on Discord, has raised $100 million at a $1.4 billion valuation, its first time crossing the unicorn line.
The Series C was led by Ribbit Capital, with Khosla Ventures and Goodwater Capital co-leading. NEA and Y Combinator also joined, according to SiliconANGLE.
It’s a sharp re-rating for a company that raised its Series B at a $370 million valuation barely 16 months ago. In between, Slash says it went from $10 million to $250 million in annualized revenue, with annualized card volume climbing from $1 billion in 2024 to $3 billion in 2025.
“We went from $10 million to $250 million in annualized revenue in 24 months,” CEO Victor Cardenas says, in remarks reported by BusinessWire.
From sneaker resellers to a vertical banking platform
Slash was founded in 2020 by Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai, who were both 19 at the time. Cardenas, a Venezuelan-born Thiel Fellow and Stanford dropout, and Bai, a University of Waterloo dropout, built an early consumer product around shareable virtual cards that went viral with teenage dropshippers.
The startup graduated from Y Combinator’s S21 batch and later pivoted into banking for sneaker resellers – a niche that evaporated almost overnight in October 2022, when Kanye West’s antisemitic comments triggered the collapse of the Yeezy market that much of Slash’s customer base depended on.
So they pivoted again. This time, into vertical banking for online businesses.
The pitch is simple. Instead of competing head-on with players like Mercury and Ramp, Slash builds industry-specific tooling for affiliate marketers, e-commerce operators, agencies, healthcare providers, contractors, wholesalers, online travel agencies and Web3 firms. Each vertical gets workflows shaped around how those operators actually move money.
“If we continue solving these niche, vertical, specific financial workflows for businesses across different industries, then we can sneakily become one of the largest commercial credit card issuers in the country,” Cardenas says, in comments reported by Fortune.
The software layer on top of a bank
Slash itself isn’t a bank. Deposit accounts and card issuing run through Column N.A., the nationally chartered bank co-founded by Plaid’s William Hockey. Corporate cards are issued as Visa charge cards with uncapped cashback, and idle cash gets routed into money market funds through a partnership with Atomic Invest.
On top of that infrastructure sits a product stack that now bundles FDIC-insured business checking, expense management, treasury, global payments, invoicing, working capital and stablecoin support – the last of which came via a partnership with Stripe’s Bridge in August 2025.
By its own account, Slash now serves more than 5,000 businesses, including AI voice startup Bland, Entry, Triumph Labs, Drink Nectar and Hike Outdoor.
Alongside the round, the company launched “Twin,” an AI agent it describes as a chief of staff for a business’s finances. Cardenas has framed that as the direction of travel.
“By the end of the year, Slash will run your financial back office for you,” he says, in a blog post announcing the company’s autonomous finance vision. “Every waking second of a business owner’s time should be spent on the needle-moving parts of their business: not their finances, not accounting busywork.”
The thesis landed with Slash’s new lead investor.
“What drew us to Slash was the speed and conviction we saw from Victor, Kevin and the team,” says Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka, in remarks reported by BusinessWire. “They’re building the bank of the future, where agents handle the processes that used to require entire departments.”
Khosla partner Jai Sajnani, whose firm has previously backed Stripe, Affirm and Ramp, described Slash as “building the financial operating system for a new class of business: lean, high-velocity operators who will move more money with fewer people than anyone thought possible.”
For Cardenas and Bai, who are now 24, the $1.4 billion valuation is less a destination than another checkpoint. The company has already pivoted twice – from dropshippers to sneaker resellers to vertical operators – and each move has reshaped what Slash actually is.
For founders watching, the takeaway is less about the round and more about the arc. The businesses that survive repeated pivots tend not to be the ones that guessed right the first time. They’re the ones that kept shipping once the original customer base disappeared.
