Marqeta was founded in 2010 by Jason Gardner and went public on the NASDAQ in June 2021. The company operates in the background of fintech — it’s the infrastructure that lets other companies issue payment cards without building the stack themselves.
Here’s how it works: when a fintech company or a gig economy platform wants to give users a debit or prepaid card, they don’t go directly to Visa or Mastercard. They use Marqeta’s APIs to create, manage, and customize card programs. Marqeta handles tokenization, authorization, funding, and compliance. Clients control the rules — spend limits, merchant restrictions, real-time notifications.
Marqeta’s biggest customer has historically been Block (Square/Cash App), which accounted for roughly 70% of its revenue — a concentration risk the company has been working to reduce. Other major clients include DoorDash, Klarna, Affirm, and Uber.
The company pioneered “just-in-time” (JIT) funding, where cards are funded at the exact moment of a transaction rather than being pre-loaded. This matters for gig economy platforms where worker payouts happen in real time.
Marqeta went public at a $16 billion valuation, though its market cap has fluctuated significantly since then. The company reported roughly $700 million in revenue for 2023. It’s headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices in the UK, Australia, and other markets.
