Zach Perret is co-founder and chief executive of Plaid, the San Francisco company that lets people link their bank accounts to apps such as Venmo, budgeting tools and lenders. He started it with William Hockey, whom he met when both were junior consultants at Bain & Company.
From Clemmons to Duke
He grew up in Clemmons, North Carolina, and studied at Duke University, where he later served as a trustee.
The Hard Part
He and Hockey first set out to build consumer finance apps, including budgeting and bookkeeping software. Connecting to people's bank accounts turned out to be the hard part, so they made that connection layer the product: a single API through which any app could, with a user's permission, read balances and transactions. Plaid raised a $2.8 million seed round in late 2013 from Spark Capital, Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, and by 2018 a $250 million Series C valued it at $2.65 billion.
The Visa Deal That Died
On January 13, 2020, Visa agreed to buy Plaid for $5.3B. Its chief executive called the bid an "insurance policy" against a threat to Visa's US debit business, and the US Justice Department sued to block it on antitrust grounds. Visa walked away. Plaid stayed independent under Perret, and in April 2021 raised $425 million at a $13.4 billion valuation.
Beyond Bank Links
He has since added payments, instant payouts over the real-time payments network, identity verification, fraud tools and credit data. In 2025 Plaid raised $575 million, and in May 2026 it partnered with OpenAI to let ChatGPT users link their bank accounts.
He set out to build a budgeting app and kept running into the same wall. The fix for that wall became the plumbing that much of American fintech now runs on.
