Braid, a start-up which aims to make shared wallets more mainstream, has closed down after just four years since it began – as global e-commerce venture financing deals continue to decline.
The US company offered multi-user accounts for friends and families to share and make it easy “to pool, manage and spend money together”.
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Users were able to make different pools to share with their loved ones for different goals and objectives.
Amanda Peyton, who previously worked with Google and Etsy, co-found Braid in January 2019. Since then, the company raised over $10m in funding from a range of investors, including Index Ventures and Accel.
The business was shut down after Peyton realised it was not going to be a lucrative and viable business venture, she wrote in a blog post.
Peyton said that the company was effectively left in a “coma from July 2022 to January 2023” when it had problems with a sponsor bank – without one, the company couldn’t operate.
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By GlobalDataTalking to TechCrunch in an interview, Peyton described the time as “bleak”.
“We were a payments company processing $0 in payment volume,” she told the publication.
The company continued to struggle even after finding a consistent sponsor bank and Peyton mostly puts this down to relying on third-party software.
Peyton said that the company’s unit economics worked well when Braid was making its own tools.
“There’s a lot of great fintech software out there, but if that software eats your entire margin, you’ll end up dead regardless,” she wrote in the blog.
The news comes as venture financing e-commerce deals plummeted after a peaking in 2021, according to GlobalData’s deal database.
In 2021, the total value of venture financing deals totalled $89.3bn, this plummeted in the following year, which saw the value total just $36.9bn.
In 2023 so far, the value of venture financing deals totalled $18bn.
According to GlobalData forecasts, the global ecommerce market grew from $2.5trn in 2016 to $5.9trn in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate of 15%
