From Cash Dash to Category King: Inside Rapyd’s Category Creation Journey

Categories are born from frustration. In 2017, Arik Shtilman couldn’t explain his company’s value proposition to investors. Today, the category he created—fintech-as-a-service—is an industry standard. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Arik shared how an elevator conversation transformed their market position.

The Communication Crisis

Every founder faces the challenge of articulating their vision, but Rapyd’s early pitches were particularly painful. “Every single meeting we had was, ‘oh, we build this infrastructure for moving money in and money out. And it’s like an international network.’ And investors don’t like to hear this bullshit,” Arik recalls. Each failed pitch meeting pushed them closer to shutdown.

The Elevator Moment

The breakthrough came from frustration. After another unsuccessful investor meeting, Arik vented to his co-founder in an elevator: “I do not understand why these idiots can’t get what we do. It’s very simple. It’s like Amazon AWS. But for fintech.” This moment of clarity led to the creation of an entirely new category.

Creating the Category

Working with his CMO, Arik refined this analogy into a new market category. “Fintech as a service as a category did not exist before Rapyd. Me and my CMO, Mark Winnitz actually invented it,” he explains. “Everybody told us it’s stupid, but today everybody’s using it one way or another.”

Market Understanding Follows Category Creation

The new positioning resonated immediately. “From that moment that we were able to articulate AWS of Fintech, aka Fintech as a Service, we went from raising 5 million to raising more than 780 something million,” Arik notes. But more importantly, it helped customers understand their own needs differently.

“Clients that had the need to more than collecting a payment with a credit or debit card said, ‘yes, I need infrastructure,'” Arik explains. “Because I need to move money in and then I need to store it and I need to KYC this consumer and I need to pay out the money. I actually need an infrastructure. But I never thought about it because I was using multiple providers.”

Building Category Leadership

Creating a category is only the first step—you also have to own it. Arik emphasizes the importance of early brand building: “Invest money in brand awareness and building a brand as early as possible… But they don’t understand that the most complicated thing when you do a sale is to have brand awareness because it reduces the friction.”

The Future of the Category

Arik sees fintech-as-a-service following cloud computing’s trajectory: “Fintech as a service in 2023 is at the same stage that cloud computing was in 2010… We will be a business that is worth 60, 70, 80, 100 billion dollars.”

The market keeps expanding naturally. “What people don’t understand about fintech infrastructure is that the total addressable market is increasing every year because the GDP is increasing, which means payments, by definition, are increasing,” Arik explains.

Category creation isn’t just about naming something new—it’s about helping the market understand an existing problem in a new way. Rapyd’s journey from confused pitches to category leadership shows how the right positioning can transform not just how investors see you, but how customers understand their own needs.