There was definitely some tension in the air, as six startups were about to pitch on stage. One of them had never even pitched in public before. Little did three of them know what this day would come to mean, and how their lives would change over the ensuing years.
The scene was an auditorium at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson Business School, at a “Financial & Retail Analytics” conference we called FARCON. It was almost ten years ago – August 2016, to be exact. I was hosting the pitch session. This little-remembered Startup Showcase, as we called it, quietly captured a pattern that would come to define Minnesota’s role in fintech and commerce innovation.
On that stage pitching were Sezzle, GrocerKey, and LiveGiveSave. A year later, at FARCON 2017 at the U’s McNamara Alumni Center, a Techstars cohort startup named Branch Messenger would pitch as well.
None of these companies was framed as “fintech” at the time. They were analytics companies. Retail companies. Behavior companies. But in hindsight, they were all working on the same underlying problem: how money moves through everyday consumer and workforce interactions.
Sezzle went on to pivot to buy now, pay later (BNPL). It did not invent it, but localized and operationalized it for a specific segment, aligning tightly with U.S. retail behavior and merchant needs. Branch, then a workforce communications platform, sat directly on top of shift work, payroll, shift cycles, and employee engagement – precisely the layer that would later enable earned wage access. LiveGiveSave, later rebranded as Spave, connected spending to saving and giving, anticipating today’s wave of embedded and values-driven financial tools. And GrocerKey built the infrastructure for local grocery e-commerce, an early signal of the digitization of everyday retail.
What ties these companies together is not category creation, but context. Each emerged from Minnesota’s unique intersection of large-scale retail, enterprise systems, and applied analytics. They didn’t start by trying to disrupt finance. They started by solving practical problems in online life and commerce – then extended into financial layers.
The outcomes were equally telling. Sezzle scaled into a publicly traded company, now with a whopping market capitalization of more than $2B (Nasdaq: SEZL). Branch evolved into a leading earned-wage access platform, growing rapidly and now partnered with Stripe. GrocerKey (which was based in Madison WI with Minnesota operations) exited to a strategic buyer, a success for the founding team. And Spave followed a less conventional path: a meaningful exit followed by the founder buying back the name and rights to certain markets to continue building the platform and operating the company independently.
Together, as we look back today, it’s quite clear these four companies can stand proudly as early Minnesota fintech pioneers. Big kudos to them!
We can be sure, however, that much more fintech innovation is yet to come in our state. Stay tuned!
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