Joseph Akintolayo has a history of creating companies to help others, and this time he’s targeting small banks.
Akintolayo’s company, Deposits, created plug-and-play banking software that lets smaller financial companies compete with larger ones boasting in-house tech teams.
His company is one of two Dallas startups selected for Google’s 2022 Black Founders Fund program that awards entrepreneurs $100,000 and effectively gives them a stamp of approval from one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.
The other North Texas winner is Marcus Cooksey, who founded an automated bookkeeping and accounting software platform for trucking businesses called Duke.ai.
Deposits’ selection came just a month after it raised $5 million in seed funding led by Austin-based ATX Venture Partners.
Akintolayo, 32, of Dallas, refers to his company as “the Shopify of banking.”
Deposits, which has about 30 team members across the U.S., can be profitable in 13 months, he said, barring a recession or other dramatic changes in the economy. Last year, the company did about $1 million in revenue, and this year it’s expected to double that. It works with 13 financial customers.
“I can’t get through my emails with a whole team of people,” he said. “We’re selling water in the desert for community banks and credit unions that are at risk of closing their doors.”
In the digital age, having the best online banking platform is essential for banks to retain customers and keep their doors open. Bank branch closures increased by 38% in 2021 to a record high of 2,927, according to S&P Global. The U.S. has lost two-thirds of banking institutions since the early 1980s, with most of them being small banks, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
“Our whole vision is to reduce technological barriers so we can reduce the financial barriers,” he said.
Akintolayo said Google’s backing means more than the $100,000, which he’s spending on product development and marketing. He said he appreciates Google doing its part to lift up Black founders.
There is a racial funding gap in the U.S., with Black-founded startups receiving just 1.2% of total venture dollars invested in the first half of 2022, according to Crunchbase.
“I don’t look like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey,” Akintolayo said. “So you might do a whole miracle, and it’s easier for them to say, ‘Wow, that’s a miracle. It’s an isolated incident.’”
Akintolayo’s journey
Akintolayo grew up going back and forth between Nigeria and Arlington before landing in Arlington permanently with his family around the age of 10.
“It was idyllic. There is actually a lot of diversity in Arlington,” he said.
He graduated from Holy Rosary Catholic School (now St. Joseph Catholic School) at age 16 with enough credits to make him a sophomore in college. He earned his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington.
That major “didn’t add much to my story,” he said. “Namely, I just wanted to do something hard to prove how smart I was, but it’s not necessarily material to who I am. It was more of a miscalculation.”
Before he knew it was a miscalculation, Akintolayo created his first startup, BioSculpt, in 2013 to 3D print medical devices and prosthetics.
“It crashed and burned,” he said with a laugh. “It was an 18-month flash in the pan. I really should’ve made it a software startup, but it was hardware-focused.”
Akintolayo said he felt like he had to be an entrepreneur because he has sickle cell anemia — where red blood cells are shaped in a way that slows or blocks blood flow, a genetic disorder that can require long hospital stays. One of his sisters died from the disease, which has no known cure.
“I used to live in the hospital,” he said. “In any given year, I’d be in a hospital bed for two months out of the year.”
When working a regular job, Akintolayo remembers fellow employees would sometimes make up rumors or give him the side eye for missing two weeks of work at a time.
“You look perfectly healthy, but you’re dealing with a serious disease,” he said. “It created this environment where it was just difficult, and that’s the case with a lot of people with a chronic disease.”
Now Akintolayo receives treatments every five weeks at UT Southwestern. He goes in to get about 12 bags of new blood, which takes four to five hours.
“It’s been a game-changer,” he said. “Because of that, I’ve been able to build a life so I don’t live at the hospital anymore.”
After abandoning BioSculpt, which made about $40,000, Akintolayo said he “licked his wounds” and taught himself to code. In 2017, he started a digital agency to build apps and websites. He called it PhilanthroLab after his love for philanthropy, and he wanted to use it for projects that helped others, he said.
At the same time, he started an organization in Nigeria called Renaissance Lab to give underserved communities the resources to be entrepreneurs. The organization is half a coding school and half an innovation lab. Some participants have gone on to work at Google, he said.
“I wanted to give people an opportunity to do what I do, which is make stuff because I have the resources to make stuff,” he said. “Some people don’t even have Internet or electricity.”
Around this time, he built a crypto exchange called YourEx.io that paid him 1% of users’ transactions and still exists under different management. He also launched a payments company called Renaissance Payments and made 1% on transactions. Deposits ended up buying Renaissance Payments.
Big break
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Akintolayo got his first big recognition after creating a platform called MyCARESAct to help automize the process for Black founders to apply for a Paycheck Protection Program loan to help keep workers on the payroll. Rather than monetizing it, he gave the website to the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, and it helped save over 100 Black-owned businesses.
Akintolayo said he knew that Black founders would be at a disadvantage in getting emergency PPP loans. When data came out later from the Federal Reserve, it showed that Black-owned businesses were five times more likely than white-owned businesses to not receive a loan.
Around the same time, Akintolayo was starting to advise Black-founded financial companies and noticed that they didn’t know how to code or talk about technology.
“There’s this huge information gap between what the solution providers can offer and what the buyers can understand,” he said. “There’s no shared language, no shared platform.”
So Akintolayo became a translator between the tech and banking industries. At the recent FinovateFall 2022 conference in New York, he built a bank in seven minutes on stage using the Deposits platform.
“I created a platform with a shared language so that people who were in the best position to offer financial services didn’t get boxed out by companies that had unlimited budgets,” he said.
Akintolayo said he’s already noticed a massive increase in interest in Deposits since the Google award was announced on Sept. 8.
“One of the challenges with being a Black founder, or in the underrepresented space, is that No. 1, it is so much harder,” he said. “No. 2, that is a good thing. Right? You’re endlessly resilient.”
