Modern commerce has consumers making plenty of recurring payments, and ScribeUp co-founder Jordan Mackler believes that consumers “really have no chance” when it comes to keeping up with them, he said.

Financial institutions have a responsibility to help people stay on top of the “recurring bills that have consumed the modern wallet,” he said.

That’s the idea behind ScribeUp, a recurring bill service for credit unions, fintechs and neobanks, which recently completed a $13 million Series A fundraise, ScribeUp said Monday, in an announcement meant to coincide with the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas.

The fundraising round was led by Curql Collective, a fintech investment firm built for credit unions, with participation from Mucker Capital and Service Ventures.

ScribeUp provides the financial infrastructure for the “recurring economy” – subscriptions, buy now, pay later payments, rent, insurance – to more than 60 financial institutions, Mackler said.

ScribeUp allows customers to identify and manage recurring payments – meaning they can cancel them and update payments methods – from within their financial institution’s app. And ScribeUp can use agentic AI to identify where users are paying for a service that is no longer priced competitively, and identify that savings opportunity for them.

“The task of an individual is too cumbersome to optimize your bill relationship, and to make sure that you are paying what is necessary for the services that add value to your life, but not overspending,” Mackler said. “That's where we come in. We connect intelligence.”

ScribeUp lets users know, proactively, when an upcoming recurring bill will put them in the red, and that they’ll need to fund the account beforehand, he said.

Origin story

ScribeUp’s origin story starts football, a personal passion for Mackler.

While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mackler was on a mission to teach his friend Yohei Oka – now ScribeUp’s co-founder and technology chief, who was then a student from Tokyo – about American football.

Down to gain a new hobby, Oka subscribed to YouTube TV and ESPN+. But as he became busy with schoolwork, he forgot about the subscriptions, and $350 in fees had already been were deducted from his bank account.

What evolved from the experience was an understanding that the level of friction and financial tools available today, in “the version of modern commerce where everything is kind of this auto-paying relationship … weren’t able to handle that,” Mackler said.

“What we set out to do is arm our financial products with the necessary visibility and control on the consumer level to be able to interact with these services and judge them on the merits of how they add value to our lives,” he said.

Funding

The Series A comprises $10 million in equity financing and a $3 million venture debt facility. Much of that funding will be put toward ScribeUp’s hiring, technology and go-to-market strategy.

“Financial institutions are constantly looking for ways to make digital banking more useful, proactive and connected to customers’ everyday lives,” Nick Evens, Curql’s president and CEO, said in a prepared statement. “We’re excited to support ScribeUp as it addresses that opportunity by bringing [artificial intelligence]-powered bill control directly into the banking experience, so institutions can provide this desired functionality, rather than lose this financial relationship to over-the-top consumer apps targeting this gap in today’s banking offering.”

Founded in 2020, ScribeUp preceded modern-level availability of agentic AI. Previously, the product was capable of tracking hundreds of the most common merchants. But with agentic AI, it can now track some 200,000 unique subscription billers.

Some of the new funding will be allocated toward improving the competency of its agentic technology.

“We're at the tip of the iceberg of connecting your bill life to the relevant actions that need to be taken,” Mackler said.