The Story of Sila: Building the Future of Financial Infrastructure

Sometimes the biggest opportunities come from solving the same problem multiple times. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sila co-founder Shamir Karkal shared how his journey from building one of the first neobanks to creating a financial infrastructure platform revealed persistent challenges in financial innovation.

The Simple Days

In 2009, when fintech was barely a concept, Shamir co-founded Simple, one of the first neobanks anywhere. “It took us three years to actually build and launch simple,” he recalls. “The biggest problem was not finding customers. The biggest problem was just building the technology and finding the bank partners, the vendors.”

The customer demand was clear. As Shamir explains, “From the earliest days of simple, it was very clear that everybody wanted a better bank. Exactly how they defined a better bank was different.” The challenge wasn’t market validation – it was infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Gap

After Simple’s acquisition by BBVA in 2014, Shamir noticed a pattern. The same infrastructure challenges that had made building Simple difficult were still hindering innovation across the industry. “Throughout all of this I’ve been trying to solve the same problem just in different ways, which is make it easier for innovators and builders to build and ship financial applications,” he shares.

This realization led to the founding of Sila in 2018. The mission was clear: “to make it easy for everybody to innovate and program with money and financial networks.” The company’s core product became a REST/HTTP API platform enabling customers to build financial applications with tools for KYC, KYB, digital wallets, virtual bank accounts, and payment capabilities.

Building for Scale

The growth has been steady and significant. “We’ve seen like about five X growth in total transactions this year… and we do anywhere from ten to 25% transaction growth month on month right now,” Shamir notes. The company now serves “close to 100 customers in total, more than 50 of whom are live.”

Yet Shamir maintains perspective about the scale of the challenge. “When you look at the overall numbers for ACH or cards or any other payment system in the US, we’re just a flea on an elephant.” This humility comes from understanding the massive scale of existing financial infrastructure – the ACH system alone moves about $73 trillion annually.

The Future Vision

Looking ahead three years, Shamir sees Sila expanding its support for payment systems while maintaining its core focus. “I think three years from today, we’ll still be serving the same customers with the same products and continuing to grow and scale that,” he explains. “I think what we will add is support for a lot more payment systems.”

He’s particularly excited about new developments like Fed Now and RTP, while acknowledging the continued importance of traditional systems like cards, ACH, wires, and even checks. The focus remains on solving the edge cases that make financial innovation challenging: “Everything about payments, especially, it’s not about the 99 or 99.9% of payments that work fine. It’s all about that .1% that have a problem.”

For Sila, success isn’t about replacing existing financial infrastructure – it’s about making it more accessible and programmable for the next generation of innovators. As the financial services landscape continues to evolve, Sila’s story demonstrates how understanding and building upon existing infrastructure, rather than trying to replace it entirely, can be the key to enabling lasting innovation.