Deck, a startup that claims to be building “the Plaid for the rest of the internet,” has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round — about nine months after closing its seed financing, it tells TechCrunch exclusively.

The new raise, led by Infinity Ventures, brings Montreal-based Deck’s total raised since its January 2024 inception to $16.5 million. Golden Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures co-led its seed raise.

Deck claims that it is building the infrastructure for user-permissioned data access — across the entire internet. Its browser-based data agents “unlock” the data from any website through automation. 

To put it more simply, Deck helps users connect any account online and aims to turn the information into structured, usable data, with full user permission.

President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert (pictured above, left to right) co-founded Deck in June 2024. 

The startup’s approach is to treat the web itself as an open platform. It operates under the premise that users have “tons of valuable data” locked behind usernames, passwords, and session-based portals with no real way to share it securely.

Deck hopes to change that.

“Just like Plaid gave developers an easy, secure way to access bank account data with user permission, Deck does the same for the 95% of platforms that don’t offer APIs such as utility portals, e-commerce backends, payroll systems and government services,” Leboeuf told TechCrunch. Its goal is to make it easier for developers to access the data users already have without all the manual work

When a user connects an account, Deck’s infrastructure handles everything behind the scenes. Its AI agents log in, navigate, and extract the data “just like a human would — but faster, more reliably, and at scale,” said Leboeuf. 

It then generates scripts to keep those connections live and reusable without AI involvement going forward.

“Companies use Deck to eliminate the friction of getting their user data from places where APIs don’t exist — or are incomplete, expensive, or unreliable,” Leboeuf said. “We basically ‘Plaid-ify’ any websites. Whether you’re doing accounting, KYC, automating reporting, or verifying a business, Deck lets you build those features in minutes instead of months.”

Leboeuf and Lavoie previously started Flinks, a startup that was dubbed the “Plaid for Canada.” The National Bank of Canada acquired it in 2021 for about US$140 million. (Lambert was one of Flinks’ first engineers.)

After that sale, the founders started talking to entrepreneurs across industries.

“Again and again, we heard the same thing: Our data is broken,’” said Leboeuf.

One founder had millions in food sales intelligence trapped in dozens of “clunky” distributor portals. Another spent months trying (and failing) to access music royalty data — to help users claim over a billion in unpaid royalties.

“We even experienced the problem firsthand,” Lavoie said. “The pattern was clear: data access was fragmented, fragile, and failing — and not just in banking. It was everywhere.”

So they built Deck, which today competes with Arcadia, a company that the founders had tried using but grew frustrated by. 

The trio believes that recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have underscored the urgency of open access to non-financial data. Without it, AI risks being trained on outdated, biased, or incomplete information.

Initially, the company has been focused on working with utility companies, having connected to over 100,000 utility providers in more than 40 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia. Customers include EnergyCAP, Quadient, and Greenly. Deck is also working with non-utility customers such as Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies. It believes that its technology can be applied to any industry where data is “trapped” in online accounts.

“Think of us as the bridge between the application layer and foundational tools like browser automation or AI operators such as Playwright, Browser Use, OpenAI Operator,” Leboeuf said. “We’ve taken the messy, foundational pieces — authentication, data normalization, rate limiting, consent management, and antibot protection — and turned them into a seamless, productized platform.”

Deck has seen the number of developers building on its platform “grow drastically” in the last couple of months, according to its founders. In February, for example, its connections grew by over 120% compared to the previous month. The startup’s pricing model is performance-driven, charging clients based on “successful” API calls.

“That means you only pay when the data works,” said Lavoie.

Like Plaid and Flinks, Deck relies only on explicit user consent to connect and collect data.

“While it may hypothetically be violating some terms and conditions, our technology follows the open data international trend that was initiated and greatly popularized by open banking, and has pushed regulators across the world to make it clear in several jurisdictions that consumers and businesses have the right to access and transfer their data,” said Leboeuf.

Deck also claims to have proprietary technologies to avoid being labeled as bots or crawlers. Those technologies include several different methods, such as vision computing and human-like mouse movement. 

“While we see a lot of antibot technologies in sectors like telcos or HR, where there is a lot of fraud from identity theft, lots of other data verticals have limited to no antibot technologies,” said Lavoie. 

For now, it’s not using the data collection to train models, instead focusing on building the best way to collect the data rather than building products on top of the collected data itself. 

“We operate in a dual consent environment, where we would need end-user consent, and Deck’s client consent, to use the data,” Leboeuf said.

The company soon plans to launch a data vertical creator, which it claims will let any developer “get up and running for any data verticals for any industry… in no time.”

Presently, Deck has 30 employees.

Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, believes that Deck is “transforming” the user-permissioned data sector, “just as open banking reshaped financial data.”

“With a modular platform and reusable recipes, they deliver speed, reliability, and adaptability that extend well beyond utilities,” he told TechCrunch. Jonker has joined Deck’s board as part of the financing.

Intact Ventures, along with previous backers Better Tomorrow Ventures, Golden, and Luge Capital also participated in the Series A financing.