Bond Financial Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based fintech startup, said it raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by venture capital fund Canaan, to help brands connect with financial institutions. 

The round was backed by technology fund Coatue and several angel investors, including Sarah Friar, Steve Frieberg, Ryan Peterson and Eric Yuan. 

Bond said it is developing a machine learning-based platform to help major technology or other brands connect with financial institutions. 

"We're at the dawn of a time when big brands will get into fintech," Roy Ng, co-founder and CEO of Bond, told Mobile Payments Today via email. "So whether its Apple offering a credit card, Lyft offering deposit accounts and debit cards to their drivers or Square lending to their customers, brands who know their end consumer best are well positioned to offer other financial products."

Ng said that the process of connecting those brands with banks and financial services firms is opaque, manual, expensive and slow. 

"Bond offers the first full-stack, enterprise grade technology platform that makes it easier for brands and banks alike to partner," Ng said. "Some of these brands will also be fintech companies, but the need goes far beyond fintech."

Ng is the former COO of Twilio and the former president and COO of Mapbox, and previously spent many years at Goldman Sachs. Co-founder and VP of Technology Matt Bradley is a former vice president of machine learning at Synapse. Yan Wu, vice president of data science and operations, is a former head of data at Sofi and vice president of analytics at BlackRock.

Cover image courtesy of Bond.