A Chicago fintech startup flying under the radar to ward off big bank competitors is breaking its silence on the B2B payments processing platform it is building as it comes off a $4 million funding round.
Tidal Commerce, founded by Drew Sementa, is a cloud-based payment software for small and mid-sized businesses. The software caters not only to smaller enterprises, but also credit unions and community banks that often don’t get attention from business clients like their larger competitors do.
The software includes built-in security and fraud detection features, underwriting and customer relationship management capabilities. Tidal Commerce’s software platform allows businesses to manage all their finances from the same dashboard, such as online banking and accounting.
The company says it averages nearly $1 billion in transaction volume every year and has thousands of clients. One of Tidal Commerce's biggest clients is the RoomPlace, a Lombard-based furniture company, Sementa said.
Based in Oak Brook, Tidal Commerce raised $4 million in venture capital funding in July from Newport Beach, Calif.-based Super G Capital, the first official funding the company has secured.
With the new financing, Tidal Commerce will expand its team, launch new marketing initiatives and further build out its tech. The startup currently employs 20 people.
“We’re building tools to deliver more features to the small and medium business market, which we believe is the meat of the economy,” Sementa said. “We’re taking these tools that the big enterprise customers use to help themselves grow and delivering to the smaller, medium-sized businesses to help them grow at a non-prohibitive cost.”
Tidal Commerce is a company born from an earlier venture Sementa started 15 years ago. In 2004, he founded Premier Payment Systems, and after acquiring a small app development firm in 2016, he tweaked the company and launched Tidal Commerce.
“We started building technology because I realized that people at our level in the industry really want innovation,” Sementa said. “It’s a huge market. It’s completely unregulated and it’s full of old-school guys that have been doing this for 30 years that haven’t innovated ever."
Tidal Commerce isn't the only Chicago fintech startup to raise funding recently. CardX, a Chicago-based B2B fintech startup that helps its clients avoid paying credit card transaction fees, raised $2 million in debt financing from Pace Financial Group earlier this week. And Tastytrade, a Chicago financial services company, invested $20 million to bring its Dough brand back to life earlier this month. Dough is an independent broker dealer that allows users to trade commission-free stock.
