When a Booking.com customer taps a co-branded credit card to book a hotel in Lisbon, the rewards math, the underwriting decision, and the swipe authorization all run through a five-year-old startup in lower Manhattan. That startup is Imprint, and as of December 2025 it has raised a Series D worth $150 million [CB Insights, Dec 2025], capping a funding run that totals roughly $338 million in disclosed capital across four rounds.
Imprint sells one thing: co-branded credit card programs that brands can launch without becoming banks themselves. The product is called Imprint Core, and per the company it powers "every sign-up, every swipe, every rewards redemption, and everything in between" [Imprint.co]. The marquee customers named on its own site are Booking.com and Rakuten [Imprint.co], two consumer brands with the kind of repeat-purchase behavior that makes a branded card economically interesting. Cards are issued by First Electronic Bank under Visa and Mastercard licenses [help.imprint.co], which keeps Imprint on the software side of the regulatory line. The card-issuing rails themselves run on Stripe, a choice the engineering team has written about publicly [Imprint Tech Blog].
The bet
The wager here is straightforward. The co-branded card market in the United States has historically been the province of a handful of giant issuers (think Synchrony, Barclays US, Capital One) selling long, complex partnerships to airlines, hotels, and big-box retailers. Imprint is pitching a software-first version of that same arrangement to a wider set of brands, with a developer-facing API stack and what the company describes as "customizable credit underwriting" that approves more of a brand's customers under a policy tuned for that brand [Imprint.co]. Integration, per the docs, is meant to put a partner's first API call "within minutes" [Imprint Docs].
If that wedge holds, the addressable surface is large. Every consumer brand with frequent repeat purchases (travel, commerce marketplaces, grocery, fuel, quick-service restaurants) is a potential program. The Series C deck, reported by Fortune in October 2024, valued the company at $600 million on a $75 million round led by Khosla Ventures [Fortune, Oct 2024]. By 2025, PYMNTS reported the valuation had crossed $1 billion and the company was "looking beyond credit" toward adjacent financial products [PYMNTS, 2025]. The Series D in December added another $150 million on top of that [CB Insights, Dec 2025].
Why the cap table matters
Imprint's investor list is the kind of signal that fintech bankers read closely. The 2021 Series A was led by Kleiner Perkins, with Stripe and Affirm participating [TechCrunch, Nov 2021]. Ribbit Capital, the Palo Alto firm behind Nubank and Robinhood, led the $75 million Series B in November 2023 [Fintech Futures, Nov 2023]. Khosla Ventures led the Series C a year later [Fortune, Oct 2024]. Three crossover-quality fintech investors, three consecutive priced rounds, no obvious down-round in the public record. That is unusual for a 2020-vintage fintech company that lived through the 2022 to 2023 valuation reset.
Series A (Nov 2021) | 38 | $M
Series B (Nov 2023) | 75 | $M
Series C (Oct 2024) | 75 | $M
Series D (Dec 2025) | 150 | $M
The round cadence tells its own story. Eighteen months between B and C, fourteen months between C and D, and the check size doubling at the most recent step. Investors are paying up for whatever the underlying program-launch and active-card metrics look like. Fortune's October 2024 reporting framed the Series C valuation jump to $600 million as a vote of confidence in the partnership pipeline [Fortune, Oct 2024]; the PYMNTS framing of a $1 billion-plus valuation a year later suggests that pipeline kept converting [PYMNTS, 2025].
The team and the work
Imprint is headquartered at 221 Canal Street in New York [CB Insights, Dec 2025]. The engineering org publishes a technical blog detailing how it stood up its card-issuing platform on Stripe in six months and built its consumer mobile app, which is live on Google Play [Imprint Tech Blog; Google Play]. Current open roles include a Senior Software Engineer for AI, a Senior iOS engineer, a Technical Program Manager, and a Marketing, Strategy and Analytics Lead [AshbyHQ; Greenhouse.io], a hiring mix that points to continued investment in both the consumer surface and the partner-facing analytics layer.
What the bears say
The credible counter-argument is competitive. Co-branded card economics are dominated by incumbent issuers with decades of underwriting data, and the largest brand programs (Delta-Amex, Costco-Citi, Amazon-Chase) are locked into multi-year exclusivity contracts that rarely come up for grabs. A software-first challenger has to either win the smaller and mid-sized brand tier first, or convince a major partner to switch issuers, which is a slow sale. The bull answer is in the customer logos Imprint already discloses: Booking.com and Rakuten are not small brands [Imprint.co], and Ribbit and Khosla are not investors who write Series B and C checks for theoretical pipelines [Fintech Futures, Nov 2023; Fortune, Oct 2024]. The more recent PYMNTS reporting that Imprint is exploring products beyond credit also suggests the team sees a path to deepening per-partner revenue rather than competing only on card economics [PYMNTS, 2025].
What to watch
Three things over the next twelve months. First, the named partner list. If Imprint adds a second tier-one travel or commerce brand in 2026, the thesis that brands will switch to a software-native issuer compounds. Second, the products-beyond-credit roadmap that PYMNTS flagged [PYMNTS, 2025]: debit, installment lending, and merchant-funded rewards are the obvious adjacencies, and any of them would meaningfully expand the per-partner contract value. Third, the credit performance of the existing portfolios as US consumer credit cycles shift. Co-branded books behave differently than general-purpose cards, but they are not immune.
With $338 million in disclosed capital, a billion-dollar-plus valuation [PYMNTS, 2025], and two consumer brands that millions of Americans actually use, Imprint has bought itself the runway to find out whether the co-branded card market really is ready for a software-native challenger.