Plaid Reaches $8B Valuation in Secondary Share Sale, Adds AI Features

Plaid reached an $8 billion valuation in February 2026, a 31% increase from the prior year, through a secondary share sale that allowed long-standing employees to cash out equity rather than raising fresh capital for the company's balance sheet. The company exceeded all of its financial expectations in 2025.

It surpassed $500 million in ARR in Q4 2025, with revenue growing nearly 40% year over year.

Plaid signed about 1,800 new enterprise customers last year. More than 400 AI companies now build on Plaid’s infrastructure, representing 20% of new customers in 2025. @FortuneMagazine reported that management views the company as becoming the foundational infrastructure for an AI-native financial system.

Plaid connects consumers’ financial accounts to third-party apps and services, providing infrastructure that powers fintech apps including payments and money-management tools like Venmo. Seun Sodipo joined Plaid as CFO in October 2025. She has a degree in applied mathematics and an MBA and previously worked at Stripe, Glossier, investment banking, and private equity.

Plaid is led by co-founder and CEO Zachary Perret. 1 billion. Visa’s acquisition of Plaid fell through in 2021, after which the company continued operating independently.

U.K. in a family of entrepreneurs, said from a very young age dinner table conversation was business. She uses AI to reclaim time, prepare for meetings, organize her week, and think through problems.

“AI in its best form should be an accelerant to a business achieving their goals,” Sodipo said. ” She uses AI to game plan, challenge her assumptions, poke holes in her arguments, and identify blind spots. Sodipo has experimented with using AI to build dashboards and query information.

“It has been really interesting to try and transition to a natural language query,” she said. Her coding experience has become a foundation for experimenting with large language models and AI. Plaid employees regularly experiment with AI in their spare time and participate in workplace hackathons.

They share AI prototypes in an internal AI Slack channel. “You do your Monday morning check in, and people are so excited to share what they’ve built over the weekend with AI,” Sodipo said. Teams at Plaid have built bots that answer recurring Slack questions, summarize tasks and emails, and support scenario planning.

In one case, a finance employee at Plaid used AI tools to run 2,000 Monte Carlo simulations without relying on a data engineer or data scientist. Plaid’s recent State of Intelligent Finance report found that more than half of Americans used AI for financial tasks in the past 12 months. Among those users, 86% said it helped them better understand their finances.

Sodipo said advice becomes more valuable when anchored in consumers’ own consent-based financial data. Separately, Deepak Ahuja was appointed CFO of Redwood Materials. Ahuja previously served as Tesla's CFO across two tenures, CFO of Verily Life Sciences, and chief business and financial officer at Zipline.

Eric Brenner was appointed CFO and treasurer of Koppers Holdings Inc. effective May 26. Brenner most recently served as SVP and CFO for NOVA Chemicals Corporation. U.S.

Organizations. 1% according to Mercer’s survey. 4%.