Cross River

Cross River was founded in 2008 by Gilles Gade. Headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the company maintains a major R&D hub in Jerusalem. Operating as a privately held entity, Cross River raised a $620 million funding round in March 2022 led by Eldridge and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Although it holds a New Jersey state commercial bank charter and is an FDIC member, Cross River operates fundamentally as a technology platform providing API-based financial infrastructure.

The company's primary model is Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS). Cross River provides the backend regulatory, lending, and payment rails that allow fintech companies to offer embedded financial services to their users. Non-bank tech companies utilize its API stack to originate loans, open accounts, and process fiat transactions via ACH, RTP, and FedNow. Publicly known clients and partners include Affirm, Stripe, Upstart, and Coinbase. The company's core moat is the direct fusion of a modern API infrastructure with a native US bank charter, allowing client applications to interact directly with fiat clearing networks without a third-party sponsor bank.

Cross River operates a large, established R&D center in the Har Hotzvim high-tech park in Jerusalem. This Israeli site serves as a primary engineering engine for the company's core banking API, payments infrastructure, and crypto integrations. Employing hundreds of workers, the Jerusalem office is a notable tech employer in the city, frequently hiring for backend engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and product management roles.