Fresh off a $260 million Series E funding round, card issuing and processing startup Marqeta is building its team as it expands to new geographies. The Oakland-based company plans to add 175 jobs this year, bringing its total to 400 employees by 2020, CEO Jason Gardner said on Wednesday.
Gardner told Bank Innovation that Marqeta will grow its team in the U.K. and Germany and will build a physical presence in new areas for expansion, including Asia, South America and Latin America. Areas of focus will include engineering; product and business development; legal; operations; program management; and marketing. The company, which is valued at more than $2 billion, also will add a chief marketing officer next week.
“The hiring is just reflecting our business growth — it’s reflecting the demand for our products,” Gardner said. “Modern card issuing is a global phenomenon.”
Though Marqeta will continue to hire in the San Francisco Bay area, it’s looking to expand its presence owing to its worldwide customer base and fierce competition for labor in the Bay Area, Gardner noted. Over the past year, the company moved from a traditional office setup to a distributed work model to make it easier to integrate a globally dispersed workforce. “We’re going to find people first and offices second versus the way this traditionally has been done, which is to find an office and then staff it,” he said.
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Marqeta draws its talent pool from fields outside financial services, a deliberate approach to infuse outside thinking into a firm that prides itself on its brain trust of “payments nerds,” according to Gardner. Recent hires include chief people officer Barbie Brewer, the former vice president of talent at Netflix; chief legal officer Seth Weissman, a former executive vice president at SolarCity; and senior vice president of operations Fiona Taylor, who previously was a senior vice president at Tesla.
“I like hiring people who don’t carry the baggage of an industry,” said Gardner. “When they come in from another industry, they think very differently about how to solve problems.”
Among the new positions posted, Marqeta is looking for a senior product manager for digital banks, a nod to Marqeta’s growing challenger bank clientele. “In the world of digital banking, we’re just scratching the surface,” Gardner said. “We’re seeing many amazing brands from N26 and Square Cash to Revolut and Monzo. We’re seeing digital banking, or the new banking phenomenon, happening around the world, and there’s a lot more to invest in with regard to product.”
Marqeta, which was established in 2010, currently counts large fintech companies among its clients, including payments firm Square and lenders Affirm and Kabbage. Its digital banking solution, which rolled out in April, lets clients build, test and refine new features in a developer sandbox; it supports France-based digital bank Morning and Switzerland-based YAPEAL.