Beyond the MVP: How Sila Turned Banking Infrastructure Challenges into a Platform Business

Beyond the MVP: How Sila Turned Banking Infrastructure Challenges into a Platform Business

Building a neobank in 2009 was like trying to construct a modern building using medieval tools. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sila co-founder Shamir Karkal revealed how this experience shaped his approach to building financial infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Problem

“It took us three years to actually build and launch simple,” Shamir recalls of his first venture. “The biggest problem was not finding customers. The biggest problem was just building the technology and finding the bank partners, the vendors.” This challenge wasn’t unique to Simple – it represented a fundamental gap in the fintech ecosystem.

The market demand was clear. “From the earliest days of simple, it was very clear that everybody wanted a better bank,” Shamir explains. But the infrastructure to deliver that better bank experience simply didn’t exist. Each new fintech company had to rebuild the same basic components from scratch.

From Problem to Platform

After Simple’s acquisition by BBVA in 2014, Shamir noticed a pattern that would eventually lead to Sila’s creation. “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 Sila’s core mission: “to make it easy for everybody to innovate and program with money and financial networks.” The company developed a REST/HTTP API platform that provides essential building blocks for financial applications – KYC, KYB, digital wallets, virtual bank accounts, and payment capabilities.

Building for Scale and Complexity

Unlike consumer applications, financial infrastructure requires handling complex edge cases. “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,” Shamir notes. This focus on edge cases has shaped Sila’s development priorities.

The approach is working. “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 shares. The company now serves “close to 100 customers in total, more than 50 of whom are live.”

The Platform Evolution

Sila’s platform approach addresses a crucial market need. Instead of each fintech company spending years building basic infrastructure, they can focus on their unique value proposition. This evolution from solving their own infrastructure problems at Simple to providing a platform solution for others represents a common pattern in B2B tech – turning internal solutions into scalable products.

Looking ahead, Shamir sees continued expansion of the platform’s capabilities. “I think what we will add is support for a lot more payment systems,” he explains, while maintaining focus on their core mission of making financial innovation accessible.

For B2B founders, Sila’s journey offers valuable lessons about platform building. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come not from creating entirely new categories, but from making existing systems more accessible and programmable. As Shamir puts it, “Startups are not like an overnight success. It takes years, sometimes decades of building before you do become that overnight success and everybody hears of you. So it is 99% perseverance.”