The Story of Canopy: The Company Building the Future of Intelligent Servicing

The Story of Canopy: The Company Building the Future of Intelligent Servicing

At 3am on a night in 2019, Matt Bivons screamed into a pillow. Y Combinator had just rejected his application to build a safe student credit card. Every VC on Sand Hill Road had already said no. His bank account was running low, and he’d been begging and borrowing to recruit a small team of engineers and designers to a vision nobody else believed in.

Twenty-four hours later, everything changed.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Bivons, CEO of Canopy, shared the brutal origin story of building a loan management platform that would eventually power some of the most innovative B2B lenders in the market. It’s a story about reading market signals over personal conviction, the difference between stubborn and resilient, and how sometimes the best product is the infrastructure nobody sees.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Fund

Before founding Canopy, Matt spent years inside fintech companies that should have had better infrastructure. At Earnest, a student loan lender competing with SoFi, and later at Greensky, the original buy-now-pay-later company, Matt saw the same pattern repeat. “I saw a very similar pain point at Earnest and Green sky when it came to servicing,” Matt recalls.

The problem was fundamental. “At Earnest and at Greensky, they built it off of very rigid tables and databases and it caused a ton of different problems. It caused problems in terms of new product creation. So if a customer wanted a different loan Type the ledger couldn’t support it,” Matt explains.

Customer service agents would spend minutes trying to answer basic questions because the systems were old and inflexible. Companies couldn’t launch new loan products without massive engineering efforts. The servicing layer—the infrastructure that handles repayments, tracks balances, manages borrower interactions—was everyone’s pain point but nobody’s product.

Matt took this insight and built a vision: a safe student credit card powered by modern servicing infrastructure. “Outside of student loan debt, credit card debt is the second thing that students graduate with,” he reasoned. He had a partner bank in Seattle, an issuer processor lined up, and was building the servicing layer himself.

That’s when every investor in Silicon Valley told him no.

The Harsh Truth

“YC tells you at midnight Pacific time, I was in Atlanta. So 3am, got rejected from Y Combinator. I screamed into a pillow that night,” Matt remembers. But the real moment of truth came the next morning.

“A friend of mine gave me some really harsh advice. And he said, you’re an amazing Founder, but this hill that you’re trying to climb is just it’s too much like you really need to take a look and understand what the market is telling you,” Matt shares.

This is the fork in the road that defines founders. Some double down, convinced the market will eventually see their vision. Others listen and adapt. Matt chose to investigate rather than insist.

Finding the Signal

Instead of pitching more VCs, Matt went looking for market demand. “I tried to reach out to some very large companies, Chime being one of them, Greenlight being another,” Matt explains. His question was simple: were these debit card companies planning to get into lending, and could they use APIs to help build co-branded credit cards?

“Back in 2019 and even still to this day, but definitely in 2019, there were so many debit card companies out there and I asked them if they were ever going to get into lending and credit and if they could use our APIs to help build a co branded credit card. And every single one said yes,” Matt recalls.

That was the signal. Not the student credit card itself—the infrastructure underneath it. The servicing layer that nobody wanted to build but everyone desperately needed.

The Surgical Pivot

What happened next required brutal simplification. “I realized at that moment that was the market pool, that was the signal that was saying I need to pivot. And so I completely gutted everything related to the student credit card, stripped away everything and went down just to the basics,” Matt explains.

The question became: “What is the hardest thing about what we are building, that no one else has that everybody else wants.” The answer was clear: “It was the servicing infrastructure, the ledgering, the lending core.”

“From that’s how we got our first investment,” Matt notes. By stripping away the consumer product and focusing exclusively on B2B infrastructure, Canopy found its product-market fit. Not through persistence, but through adaptation.

The Five-Year Journey

The path from that pivot to today wasn’t linear. Canopy tried self-service PLG, attracting the wrong customers. “So were getting kids from Stanford in their dorms trying us out. And lending is really hard. Like you have to know what you were doing and that was not our customer,” Matt admits.

They served both B2C and B2B lenders, spreading themselves too thin. This year, they made another painful decision: “We cut out a significant portion of our consumer lending funnel. It represented over 50% of our sales pipeline.” The result? “It has paid off tremendously with massive growth for Canopy in 2024.”

Each failure taught a lesson. Each pivot refined the focus. “I think that is one of the biggest superpowers of successful companies and founders is being able to adapt and evolve and not being stuck to any one way. And that is true in every functional area of the company, whether it’s marketing, go to market, whether it’s product, whether it’s technology,” Matt reflects.

But through all the changes, the core thesis remained constant. “Right now for us now, five years in, our thesis is very much still the same, right? Like we want to… facilitate best in class lending experiences,” Matt says. The vehicle changed from consumer product to B2B infrastructure, but the destination never did.

“From a first principal standpoint, I thought that would be for students and credit cards. Now we’re just powering companies that do that. And so it’s very much like a Trojan horse where we go in, we’re the infrastructure and then as Our companies grow, our partners grow, Canopy grows,” Matt explains.

The Future: Intelligence Servicing

Five years in, Matt sees the next evolution clearly. “We believe in a concept called intelligence servicing,” he explains. Today’s lending industry is fundamentally reactive—you miss a payment, then they call you. Your statement arrives, then you take action.

Canopy’s vision flips this model. “For us, we have a very unique vantage point of being the heartbeat of every lending program. And so we believe in AI and ML being able to create recommendations and insights that turn servicing from a cost center into a profit center,” Matt says.

The insight is powerful: “90% of the life cycle of a loan happens in the servicing layer.” Companies that want best-in-class lifetime value and engagement need to be great servicers. “Our infrastructure helps support that. And if we can make them better lenders, we can create better borrowers. And we’re going to do that through the technology that we build,” Matt explains.

It’s an ambitious vision—transforming the invisible infrastructure layer into an intelligent system that proactively improves lending outcomes for both companies and borrowers. From that 3am rejection to reimagining how lending should work, Matt’s journey exemplifies what he calls the founder’s superpower: “Being able to adapt and evolve and not being stuck to any one way.”

Sometimes the best product isn’t the one you set out to build. Sometimes it’s the infrastructure that makes everyone else’s vision possible.