Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

I’ve always used cash infrequently, but since the COVID-19 era began, I have withdrawn money from an ATM just a few times. For more than a year, nearly all of my transactions have been cloud-based.

More consumers are going cashless, which is good news for payments platforms: Marqeta is one of several companies that’s seeing rapid growth recently; late last week, it filed an S-1 that will take its “modern card issuing and transaction processing” platform public.

In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm explains the inner workings of Marqeta’s business before diving into its operating results.

“The company’s two key revenue sources are both growing like a weed, adjusted profits have arrived, and GAAP losses are falling,” writes Alex. “It’s a solid package,” but he also notes several caveats to consider.

For starters, Marqeta’s growth is “highly dependent” on Square’s fortunes, he concludes. In a subsequent post, he’ll look at Flywire, a global payments company that also filed to go public recently.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; have a great week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Flash Sale: Buy an Extra Crunch annual plan, get a free Disrupt pass

Sponsored by TechCrunch

We’re offering a free Disrupt Innovator pass to anyone who purchases a 1- or 2-year Extra Crunch membership today.

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Considering how much time many of us spend behind the wheel, there’s an infinite number of applications for the technology.

For our latest Extra Crunch market map, we sized up the general market opportunity before creating a roster of major players and reaching out to investors to see where they’re placing bets.

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So when and how should you think about doing email marketing, versus all of your other frantic priorities?

Here at Extra Crunch, we’re helping you find the answers. Today, we’re launching a survey of founders who want to recommend a great email marketer or agency they have worked with to the rest of the startup world.

Fill out the survey here.

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