Hyperplane, a San Francisco-based startup that builds basic models to help banks predict customer behavior, is coming out of stealth today to announce a $6 million funding round led by former Stripe executive Lachy Groom, along with SV Angel, Clocktower Technology. Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Latitud, Atman Capital, Crestone VC and Norte. The general idea here is to help banks use first-party data to create personalized experiences by predicting user behavior.
The company already works with about a dozen banks in Brazil and has no plans to expand to the US. And while Hyperplane is currently focused exclusively on the banking world, over time, the team plans to bring its technology to other companies as well.
Hyperplane was founded by Felipe Lamounier, Daniel Silva, Rohan Ramanath and Felipe Meneses. Lamounier (CEO) has spent the last seven years building StartSean EdTech startup in Brazil, while Daniel Silva and Rohan Ramanath previously built large-scale AI systems at Google and LinkedIn.
Hyperplane Founders Felipe Meneses, Rohan Ramanath, Felipe Lamounier and Daniel Silva
“The basic premise we started with was: what does it take to create a level of personalization for banks around the world,” explained Ramanath. “If you think about the big tech companies, they have a lot of first-party data, but they also have a lot of investment in data infrastructure and enterprise data warehouses to use all that data to understand the consumer, create personalization on every product page, and finally integrate the in the consumer experience itself. The goal for the hyperplane is, if banks around the world have a lot of first-party data, what does it take to create a layer of data intelligence so that banks can connect that first-party data?”
Lamounier also highlighted the fact that banks have detailed data about their customers that is not available to other services. “One of the arguments I use to sell to banks is that the data these banks have about me as a customer is much more vulnerable to capturing my behaviors than what Google or Facebook have. It doesn’t matter if I go to Porsche’s website — that doesn’t mean I can buy a Porsche. But Chase or Bank of America, they know the kind of restaurants I go to, what grocery store I go to. If I pick up Uber, what is the affordable price? All this data is internal.”
Currently, most banks barely provide personalized experiences, so the baseline is low. But consumers increasingly expect their banking experience to be more like their other online experiences — especially in a competitive market for banks like Brazil. At its core, Hyperplane provides these banks with the APIs to build these personalization models on the fly. All of these deployments are private and the team emphasized that they do not share data. Hyperplane also uses its own models for all of this.
Currently, the company offers two modules: one for creating audience segments and another for creating similar audiences to expand your potential audience targets by finding similar users. something custom and grassroots,” said Ramanath.
More recently, Hyperplane released Mandelbrot LLM, a model that helps banks predict when, for example, a customer might bounce or which users treat a given bank as their primary bank.
Hyperplane says that using its services has enabled the credit limit department of a neobank in Brazil to increase transaction volume by 46%, for example, by being able to gain a clearer picture of its customers’ estimated income.
“Brazil has gone through a major pro-competition movement in the last decade and today we see an ecosystem that is willing to adopt new technologies,” noted Lamounier. “Hyperplane Cloud can be expanded to all markets with little effort and we will soon announce our first partnerships in the US”
