Seattle just dropped another beat in fintech. Upward, the embedded finance infrastructure startup led by Co-Founder & CEO Aaron Gregory and Co-Founder & COO Danielle Hill, just locked in an $8M Seed+ round to scale its mission of helping brands build, launch & grow digital financial products with speed. The round was led by Dundee Venture Capital & Breakwater Ventures Fund, with backing from Techstars, Altari Ventures, Cascade Seed Fund & Outside Ventures. The announcement came paired with a new partnership with Mastercard, giving companies the power to launch branded credit, banking & payment programs in weeks, not months.
Aaron Gregory and Danielle Hill didn’t stumble into this space; they built the playbook for how fintech moves at scale. Both veterans of Remitly, Gregory spent 6 years steering global compliance, risk & legal through hypergrowth while Hill mastered operational precision across Remitly, The Riveter & Amazon. Together, they’ve turned Upward into a platform that trims the fat from fintech builds, no tangled vendor web, no red tape, no waiting on regulators to catch up.
Upward’s platform runs like a finely tuned engine, modular, developer-first & designed to launch. APIs handle card issuance, banking, payments & compliance under one roof. Instead of stacking 5 vendors & 3 risk reviews, a company plugs in once and gets a full suite of infrastructure ready to go. It’s fintech without the friction, built for brands that don’t have time to babysit integrations.
The Mastercard partnership is the catalyst. By integrating Mastercard’s Easy Savings & Business Builder Program, Upward clients can drop custom-branded card experiences into the market before most competitors finish their compliance audits. Scout, a Techstars ’23 alum, is already using it to power NIL financial programs for college athletes at SMU & Iowa State, turning student-athlete banking from an idea into execution.
But this isn’t just another funding headline; it’s a signal that embedded finance is maturing. The past few years have been chaos: fragmented systems, endless APIs, & a graveyard of half-built fintech dreams. Upward’s move brings order to that noise. It’s building the rails for creators, gig platforms & small businesses to move capital seamlessly, with compliance handled quietly in the background.
Think of it this way: AWS did it for computing. Upward’s doing it for money. And while everyone else is chasing disruption, Aaron & Danielle are busy building infrastructure that hums, quietly, reliably, and fast.
This $8M round isn’t just capital; it’s confirmation that the next wave of embedded finance will be clean, compliant & lightning-quick. Upward is the platform turning financial friction into forward motion.
