Deck Secures $12M to Use AI for Enhancing Website Functionality

Deck Secures $12 Million in Series A Funding

Deck, a startup that boldly declares itself as the "Plaid for the rest of the internet," has successfully raised $12 million in a Series A funding round, just nine months after closing its seed financing. This news was shared exclusively with TechCrunch. The round was led by Infinity Ventures, bringing the total funds raised by the Montreal-based company to $16.5 million since its inception in January 2024. Golden Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures co-led the seed round back in the day.

At the core of Deck's mission is the development of infrastructure that facilitates user-permissioned data access across the entire internet. Their browser-based data agents are designed to "unlock" data from any website through automation. In simpler terms, Deck aims to help users connect any online account and transform the retrieved information into structured, usable data, all with the user's full consent.

Founded in June 2024 by President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert, Deck treats the web as an open platform. They believe that users have "tons of valuable data" trapped behind usernames, passwords, and session-based portals, making it difficult to share securely. Deck is on a mission to change this landscape.

"Just like Plaid provided developers with 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 explained to TechCrunch. Their goal is to streamline data access for developers, eliminating the need for manual data collection.

When a user connects an account, Deck's infrastructure takes over, handling everything behind the scenes. Their AI agents log in, navigate, and extract the data "just like a human would — but faster, more reliably, and at scale," according to Leboeuf. Once the data is extracted, Deck generates scripts to maintain those connections without further AI involvement, ensuring they remain live and reusable.

"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 added. "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."

Repeat Founders

Leboeuf and Lavoie are no strangers to the startup world, having previously founded Flinks, known as the "Plaid for Canada." The National Bank of Canada acquired Flinks in 2021 for about US$140 million. Lambert, one of Flinks' early engineers, joined them in their new venture.

Following the sale of Flinks, the founders engaged with entrepreneurs from various industries and noticed a recurring theme: "Our data is broken." They heard stories like one founder who had millions in food sales intelligence stuck in dozens of clunky distributor portals, and another who struggled for months 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."

This realization led them to create Deck, which now competes with Arcadia, a company they had previously tried and found lacking. The trio believes that recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the need for open access to non-financial data, as without it, AI risks being trained on outdated, biased, or incomplete information.

Initially, Deck focused on utility companies, connecting to over 100,000 utility providers in more than 40 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia. Their customers include EnergyCAP, Quadient, and Greenly. Deck is also working with non-utility clients such as Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies, believing their 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."

Rapid Growth

Deck's platform has seen a significant increase in developer activity over the past few months. In February alone, their 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 operates strictly 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," Leboeuf explained.

Deck also employs proprietary technologies to avoid being flagged as bots or crawlers, using 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," Lavoie noted.

Currently, Deck is not using the collected data to train models, focusing instead on perfecting data collection rather than building products on top of the data. "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 is gearing up to launch a data vertical creator, which they claim will enable any developer to "get up and running for any data verticals for any industry… in no time."

Deck currently employs 30 people.

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.