The Story of Immediate: Building Financial Wellness for 180 Million American Workers

The Story of Immediate: Building Financial Wellness for 180 Million American Workers

Four years into building his second startup, Matt Pierce had a conversation with his wife. He’d promised her “just give me three to five years” when he started Immediate in 2018. Now, in year four, she reminded him of that timeline. His response? “Give me three to five more years.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Pierce, CEO and Founder of Immediate, shared the story of building a financial wellness platform in one of America’s most regulated industries—and why the journey is far from over.

The Healthcare Tech Foundation

Matt didn’t start in fintech. “I’ve been a healthcare technology guy most of my career,” he explains. His first company experienced rapid growth and went public in 2012, eventually exiting for $650 million to a private equity firm. That experience taught him how high-growth tech companies operate at scale.

But success in someone else’s company left Matt wanting more. “I always had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur,” he says. After the exit, he started investing—not in other companies, but in himself and what he wanted to build next.

The transition from healthcare tech to fintech wasn’t random. Matt saw an opportunity to apply the same systems thinking he’d developed in healthcare to a different problem: the financial stress crushing American workers. He’d learned how to navigate complex regulatory environments, build products for frontline workers, and scale operations in industries with thin margins. Financial wellness would require all of those skills.

Year One: Jumping Through Hoops

September 2018 marked Immediate’s founding, but the product wouldn’t reach customers for another year. “It took us about a year to get the first company going, jumping through legal regulatory compliance hurdles, writing the code, and getting the proof of concept out there,” Matt recalls.

That first year tested the team’s resolve. Building financial services software means navigating state-by-state lending regulations, banking partnerships, and compliance frameworks that can kill startups before they process their first transaction. Many founders would have given up. Matt’s healthcare background had prepared him for exactly this kind of regulatory complexity.

The first customer came in September 2019—exactly one year after founding. That timing wasn’t coincidental. Matt and his team had spent twelve months ensuring they could deliver on a simple promise: seamless access to earned wages with zero implementation pain for employers.

The Discovery Phase: Taking Anything and Everything

With the platform live, Immediate faced a classic early-stage question: who’s our ideal customer?

Matt’s answer: we don’t know yet.

“In the first year or so of selling, we really took anything, right?” he admits. “Let’s just figure out what makes sense and let’s make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place.”

This wasn’t undisciplined growth—it was intentional market discovery. The team needed enrollment and usage data before they could identify patterns. “What we started doing was evaluating the data and seeing areas, verticals and individuals and demographics that were enrolling and utilizing the platform the most,” Matt explains.

The data revealed something surprising. Healthcare and hospitality weren’t just good fits—they were extraordinary fits, with enrollment rates double or triple other industries. Even more specific: “87% of our users are earning less than $60,000 a year.”

This demographic precision became Immediate’s targeting foundation. Shift workers with unpredictable schedules and bills that don’t align with bi-weekly paydays. Nurses wondering how to pay Wednesday’s bill when payday is Friday. Restaurant workers trying to keep food on the table for their kids. These weren’t abstract personas—they were real people whose financial stress followed them into work.

The Relocation: Bigger Fish, Smaller Pond

Immediate started in Atlanta but made an unconventional move—relocating headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama. “We moved here because we wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond,” Matt explains. “And we felt like we’d have opportunities to recruit better talent and get some of what we would look at as some of the top talent in this community.”

Birmingham’s tech ecosystem had matured through several successful exits over the previous decade. The talent was there, but without the competition and cost structure of major tech hubs. Immediate kept an Atlanta presence for additional hiring but built its core operations in Birmingham.

The decision paid off in unexpected ways. “When we talk about weaponizing hospitality, it’s taking kind of this Southern mindset, this Southern hospitality that a lot of our team brings to bear from an implementation and customer success and customer support team,” Matt notes. That cultural advantage translated into zero customer churn—hundreds of employers, not a single one lost.

The Mission That Filters Everything

As Immediate scaled, Matt needed a framework for decision-making that went beyond revenue targets. The answer became the company’s north star: “Our mission is to positively impact the financial well being of a million Americans by the end of 2024.”

This mission shaped everything, including capital raising. Immediate raised nearly $10 million in equity primarily from high net worth individuals and family offices rather than institutional investors. “When we go in and we sit down with potential investors or existing investors and we talk to them about that and the track that we’re on and the path that we’re headed down, people that align with that mission and want to be a part of this are ones that we typically lean towards,” Matt explains.

The strategy gave Immediate something invaluable: patient capital aligned with long-term impact rather than quarterly growth targets. With proven traction—six figures of eligible employees and 60 deals closed in the past 100 days—the company now plans to pursue institutional funding in 2023 from a position of strength.

The Macroeconomic Moment

Late 2022 brought external forces that accelerated Immediate’s growth. COVID-19 job uncertainty gave way to historic inflation. Gas prices spiked. Every American felt the financial pressure, but Immediate’s core demographic felt it acutely.

“When you take a vertical that we do very well in, like healthcare, and you have someone who’s a nurse who’s making X amount of dollars a year or X amount of dollars per hour, that is now having stress outside of the office,” Matt explains. “And they’re going into the workplace, and they’re seeing patients. And in the back of their mind, they’re wondering, how am I going to pay this bill?”

Immediate’s timing proved fortuitous, but Matt attributes success to preparation meeting opportunity. “That’s a testament to, again, having a really great product and some macroeconomic factors that we can’t control but we can participate and be a part of,” he says. “But also it’s a testament to the maturity of this organization.”

The company had built the systems, processes, and team structure to capitalize when conditions accelerated adoption. Sales cycles shortened. Objections diminished. The value proposition became undeniable.

The Future: Beyond Earned Wage Access

Four years in, with “three to five more years” ahead, Matt’s vision extends far beyond giving people early access to paychecks. “I look at the Financial Wellness earned wage access market of what we do and it’s still less than 15% penetrated,” he observes. “There’s 180,000,000 people in the US workforce and we’re sitting here in late 2022. I believe by 2030 every company in the US is going to be offering some form of earned wage access.”

That market inevitability shapes Immediate’s roadmap. The first step—breaking the cycle of predatory payday loans and title loans—is just the beginning. “We want to help people along the way to not just get them unhooked from these predators out there, but also to give them a path to grow and start putting money aside for savings,” Matt explains. “So when the unexpected happens, outside of using Ewa, they can use that, but also to put things aside for retirement at some point or college or whatever it may be.”

This evolution from earned wage access to comprehensive financial wellness positions Immediate for the long game. The company isn’t racing to capture market share in a zero-sum battle—they’re building infrastructure for a category moving from 15% to near-universal penetration.

“We really view ourselves as a financial wellness company and in the next five years we think we’re going to be able to put a really solid fingerprints all over the US workforce and improving financial well being across the country,” Matt says.

It’s an ambitious vision backed by disciplined execution. Zero churn. Data-driven vertical focus. Mission-aligned capital. A team built on hospitality values competing in a market where service differentiates as much as technology.

The conversation Matt had with his wife about needing “three to five more years” makes sense now. Immediate isn’t building a feature—they’re building the financial wellness layer for America’s workforce. That takes time, patience, and exactly the kind of long-term thinking that makes entrepreneurs ask their spouses for just a few more years.

For 180 million American workers, those extra years might make all the difference.