Marqeta

Prospectus Summary

PROSPECTUS SUMMARY This summary highlights selected information that is presented in greater detail elsewhere in this prospectus. This summary does not contain all of the information you should consider before investing in our Class A common stock. You should read this entire prospectus carefully, including the sections titled “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and our consolidated financial statements and the related notes included elsewhere in this prospectus, before making an investment decision. Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms “Marqeta,” “the company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” in this prospectus refer to Marqeta, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiary.

Marqeta, Inc.

Overview

Marqeta created modern card issuing, and we believe modern card issuing is at the heart of today’s digital economy.

When you order food using DoorDash or groceries using Instacart, modern card issuing works in the background as money moves from the app to the delivery driver’s payment card, allowing the driver to pay for exactly what you ordered, and nothing else.

When you buy a big screen TV and pay for it in installments using Affirm or Klarna, modern card issuing helps move money to the payment card that Affirm or Klarna uses to seamlessly pay the merchant.

When you receive money from your friend through Square’s Cash App, modern card issuing helps move the funds to your debit card, making it instantly available to you to make purchases.

Marqeta’s modern card issuing platform, or our Platform, empowers our Customers—which include businesses like Affirm, DoorDash, Instacart, Klarna, and Square—to create customized payment cards that provide innovative payment experiences for their customers and end users. Before the rise of modern card issuing, creating cards was slow, complex, and subject to mistakes. Marqeta helps solve these problems. Our Platform, powered by open APIs, enables businesses to develop modern, frictionless payment card experiences for consumer and commercial use cases that are either the core of, or in support of, their core business.

The digitization and commercialization of electronic payments is accelerating as commerce continues to shift to online and mobile payments. Over the last ten years, the reach of card-based payments expanded as technology eased merchants’ acceptance of card payments. In contrast, card issuing saw relatively little innovation as financial institutions were the primary users of card issuing technology, and their needs largely remained the same. Consequently, those cards had limited functionality.

As technology-centric organizations with novel business models and needs, such as Uber and Expensify, have gained popularity over the last decade, the inherent constraints of legacy issuing technology needed a new approach. Developers, technical product managers, and visionary entrepreneurs desire the tools and infrastructure necessary to build their products to serve customers around the world. They require open, configurable, and well-documented APIs to embed advanced payment technologies natively into their platforms to programmatically authorize and direct these payment flows without needing to integrate directly with Issuing Banks and Card Networks. Open APIs have spurred innovation in previously entrenched industries.

We built the Marqeta Platform to address these needs. Our modern architecture allows for flexibility, a high degree of configurability, and accelerated product development, democratizing access to card issuing technology.

Marqeta’s open APIs provide instant access to our highly scalable, cloud-based, and configurable payment infrastructure that enables our Customers to launch and manage their own card programs, issue cards to their customers or end users, and authorize and settle payments transactions.

Our business is supported by our first-mover advantage and a deep moat of technology, customer, and industry expertise. Marqeta is the first company to offer a Platform for modern card issuing and transaction processing and we believe also the first to market with multiple issuing and processing innovations, including the first open APIs, JIT Funding, and Tokenization as a Service. Modern card issuing is secure card issuing and processing delivered via an open API platform that enables card issuers to create customized payment card products that leverage a just-in-time funding feature, authorizing their end users’ transactions in real-time. Integrated with major global and local Card Networks, modern card issuing enables card issuers to build payment solutions to their specifications and launch them globally. We believe that Marqeta is now the ‘de facto’ modern card issuing Platform and that our continuous innovation further cements and expands our market-leading position.

We believe we are deeply integrated with our Customers in three ways: our technology underpins their core business or supports a core business process, our people become their trusted partner, and our solutions drive their key processes. In addition, our usage-based business model provides a win/win for both our Customers and us: as their businesses thrive, our net revenue grows. The strength and durability of our Customer relationships are evidenced by our year-over-year net revenue growth of 103% for the year ended December 31, 2020 and our dollar-based net revenue retention¹ of over 200% for each of the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020.

In the three months ended March 31, 2021, the Marqeta Platform processed $24.0 billion of total processing volume, or TPV, up 167% from $9.0 billion in the three months ended March 31, 2020. In 2020, the Marqeta Platform processed $60.1 billion of TPV up 177% from $21.7 billion in 2019. The full year 2020 TPV is less than 1% of the annual $6.7 trillion of transaction volume conducted through U.S. issuers in 2020, as estimated by The Nilson Report, and a fraction of the $30 trillion of value exchanged annually across global Card Networks in 2019, as estimated by The Nilson Report. Our products meet the card issuing and transaction processing needs of commerce disruptors and large financial institutions alike. Marqeta has already emerged as a card issuing platform category leader in many disruptive verticals, including on-demand delivery, alternative lending, expense management, disbursement, digital remittances, and digital banks, and our Platform is sought out by large financial institutions to improve their existing offerings and stay competitive with technology-focused new market entrants.

As we expand our use cases, product offerings, and global footprint, we attract new industry innovators and help existing Customers expand into new verticals, programs, markets, and geographies. Our Customers consistently tell us that our ability to work at speed, simplify the complex, and envision their end users’ experience helps them focus on what they do best—building innovative products and serving their customers. We believe our culture of customer centricity, innovation, teamwork, and clarity of mission is why Customers trust us with their mission critical payments needs and continue to grow and expand with us.

We have grown and scaled rapidly in recent periods. Our total net revenue was $143.3 million and $290.3 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively, an increase of 103%. For the three months ended March 31, 2020 and 2021, our net revenue was $48.4 million and $108.0 million, respectively, an increase of 123%. We incurred net losses of $58.2 million and $47.7 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively, a decrease of 18%. For the three months ended March 31, 2020 and 2021, we incurred net losses of $14.5 million and $12.8 million, respectively, a decrease of 12%.

Trends in Our Favor

Several significant secular tailwinds strengthen our market-leading position, growth strategy, and competitive advantage. Innovations in technology and the internet have greatly increased the digitization and velocity of worldwide commerce. Fundamental changes in global commerce are creating a critical need for the digitization and transformation of the payments ecosystem, setting the stage for industry disruption. This opens the door for meaningful innovations in card issuing, transaction processing, and the digitization of global money movement.

The Shift to Digital Payments is Accelerating

Digital commerce is increasing rapidly. Visa estimates that from 2016 to 2022, the share of global retail commerce conducted online is expected to more than double from 9% to 19%. Similarly, Euromonitor projects electronic payments will represent 46% of the total global transaction volume by 2025, up from 31% in 2017. We believe that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these shifts to digital payments. Indeed, Bain & Company estimates that because of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of global digital transaction volumes in 2025 will increase from 57% to 67%. According to McKinsey, a half-decade of change has happened in a few months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with global cash payments dropping four to five times the annual decline rates seen over the last few years as consumers and businesses purchase a wider range of goods and services online.

We believe these digital commerce and electronic payment trends are the precursors to increased TPV across the Marqeta Platform.

Software and Payments are Converging

Payments are not only becoming more digital but are also integrated more frequently into consumer and business applications. Payments capabilities are already seamlessly embedded in software applications such as ride sharing, home rental, messaging, and digital marketplaces. According to McKinsey, 60% of global digital commerce is expected to be made up of alternative payments by 2023. With this evolution, software companies are partnering with payments companies to provide simple, scalable, and configurable payment services across multiple geographies to meet their end users’ needs.

The Experience Economy is Driven by Developers who Need Modern Platforms

Across a range of industries, user experience is emerging as a primary battleground where businesses compete. Consumers now expect elegant digital experiences in nearly every aspect of their lives, from driving, ordering food, and controlling their home devices, to paying bills and banking.

If the basis of a company’s success has become its ability to create relevant and compelling user experiences, it is the software developer who leads this process. It is now developers who influence some of the most important business decisions, and they, in turn, demand modern platforms that are most likely to keep up with the pace of their imaginations—with tools and services that are of the highest configurability, flexibility, and speed.

Modern platforms with open APIs are democratizing access to ecosystems, including payments, giving businesses and their developers the tools they need to embed payments into their offerings with minimal friction. In the past, payments have been the domain of a very limited number of players with specific expertise, and now, with modern platforms, developers have convenient access to this expertise.

Trust in New Payment Technology is Expanding

The proliferation of digital commerce required consumers and businesses to become comfortable with digital payments. Two decades after PayPal transformed online payments, consumers and businesses are increasingly turning to digital payments, digital banks, and payment technology companies for a wide range of financial services. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are willing to rely on digital payments for a wider variety of services. PYMNTS research finds that 40% of all U.S. consumers—approximately 99 million people—do not plan to resume regular in-store shopping.

The Rise of Globalization, the Gig Economy, and Open Data

With or without physical travel, global interconnectedness is now a fact of life for users of social networks, ride sharing platforms, ecommerce marketplaces, peer-to-peer payment apps, and personal financial applications. The accelerating pace of globalization requires businesses to find payments solutions that span geographies, currencies, and payments infrastructure. In addition, the gig economy has created new expectations about the nature of labor, transforming how and when people work and get paid. Furthermore, through digitization, advancements in technology, and various regulatory reforms, global payments data is increasingly available to financial technology innovators. The data generated by payments transactions represents a significant opportunity to minimize fraud, thereby expanding trust in new payments technology. Extensive data also helps to improve business intelligence and increase the value of payments products. These trends create numerous new use cases for relevant user experiences, digital payments, and software integrations. To take advantage of these opportunities, these emerging businesses need access to a simple, agile, scalable, and reliable platform, and we believe we are only at the beginning of this transformation in multiple geographies.

The combination of these tailwinds at Marqeta’s back propels us forward. Collectively, we believe they explain why Marqeta’s simple, trusted, and scalable global modern card issuing Platform is successful and why it continues to meet the growing needs of innovative businesses.

Our Industry

According to The Nilson Report, in 2019, consumers and businesses worldwide made over 440 billion purchase transactions on global network cards, aided by approximately 24 billion payment cards in circulation. Since the advent of card-based payments in the 1940s and 1950s, card payments have become the backbone of commercial activity due to their ease of use and widespread acceptance. A complex ecosystem underpins these transactions, consisting of Issuing Banks and Acquiring Banks, Acquirer Processors, Issuer Processors, and the Card Networks that facilitate the exchange of information and funds behind each transaction.

While the acquirer-facing side of the payments ecosystem has seen significant technology innovation over the last several years, the issuer-facing side has remained largely stagnant. There are approximately 300 Acquiring Banks within the United States. However, there are only approximately 200 Issuer Processors globally. Large financial institutions have historically relied on inflexible and complicated legacy issuer processor infrastructure. This in turn makes launching new card programs and supporting cutting-edge use cases difficult and time consuming—ultimately stifling innovation.

Modern Payments Ecosystem

Today’s card issuers include technology-centric companies that are looking to digitally integrate payment cards into their platforms and process a rapidly growing number of complex payments transactions. Twenty-first century products, including online marketplaces, sharing economy platforms, digital banking, and on-demand services, require fast to launch, configurable, and reliable payment solutions. To meet these demands and respond to the changing behaviors of end users, businesses require a modern card issuing and transaction processing platform that overcomes legacy technology constraints while also being able to integrate seamlessly with Issuing Banks and Card Networks.

This modern infrastructure allows for significant innovation in the payments ecosystem. It enables a new class of card issuers to emerge by simplifying and democratizing the issuing process. It expands the issuing medium beyond physical cards to keep pace with the demands of digital commerce and mobile wallets, increasing regulatory and security requirements, and cross-border capabilities. It gives developers highly configurable controls that enable them to provide a customized solution to their business and customer needs. It operates on an extensible cloud infrastructure that works globally and enables scale and simplicity even as card issuer, merchant, and consumer demands become increasingly complex.

In other words, a modern payments ecosystem puts innovation, accessibility, flexibility, control, and scale into the hands of card issuers by delivering all of these benefits in one easy-to-use platform. This type of platform solution powers the growth of new verticals and new card issuers and enables innovation for large financial institutions who are looking to expand their products and use cases to remain competitive in an increasingly digitized world. We believe Marqeta has built such a platform.

Our Platform and Products

Marqeta provides a single, global, cloud-based, open API Platform for modern card issuing and transaction processing. In contrast to legacy infrastructure, the Marqeta Platform provides next generation payment experiences for tech-driven, developer-led companies and is well positioned to address the payment needs of commerce disruptors, tech giants, and large financial institutions.

Our Platform has a number of key attributes, including:

Marqeta’s modern, global Platform helps many of the world’s innovators build, run, and optimize their card programs. Our innovative products are developed with deep domain expertise and a customer-first mindset. At its core, our Platform offers three primary capabilities: Marqeta Issuing, Marqeta Processing, and Marqeta Applications to launch, scale, and manage card programs.

•  Marqeta Issuing: We enable our Customers to issue physical, virtual, and tokenized cards. With approximately 320 million cards issued through the Marqeta Platform as of March 31, 2021, across a deep and varied Customer base, we have significant industry experience supporting card programs of multiple types and sizes.

•  Marqeta Processing: Our Platform can process transactions with control and speed for our Customers, leveraging certain of our core competencies.

•  Marqeta Applications: Using the Marqeta Platform, Customers can leverage applications that cover the entire payments lifecycle, including development tools; program administration; and fraud, cases, and chargebacks. These applications help ensure their programs are as successful as possible.

Our Business Model

Our modern, cloud-based, open API Platform delivers card issuing and transaction processing services for global money movement, tailored to the needs of developers, technical product managers, and visionary entrepreneurs at innovative companies. As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 57 million active cards² and during the twelve-month period ending December 31, 2020, we processed approximately 1.6 billion transactions on our Platform across the globe.

We employ a usage-based model, based on processing volume, that aligns our interests with those of our Customers. We derive the majority of our revenue from Interchange Fees generated by card transactions through our Platform. In addition to Interchange Fees, we also generate revenue from other processing services, including monthly platform access, ATM fees, fraud monitoring, and tokenization services.

Our Platform enables new and existing Customers to create innovative and configurable card issuing programs and to increase their processing volumes. Additionally, as we expand our use cases, product offerings, and global footprint, we help our Customers expand into new verticals, programs, markets, and geographies. We have experienced significant success with this strategy to date. We achieved year-over-year net revenue growth of 103% for the year ended December 31, 2020 and dollar-based net revenue retention of over 200% for each of the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020.

Our Strengths

The following strengths and advantages power our business model:

Modern Card Issuing Trailblazer: Marqeta created modern card issuing. We believe we have the first-mover advantage and have leveraged it to establish strong brand recognition and capture significant market share in an industry where customer retention is key and innovation can provide outsized rewards. We believe being first in the market and one of the only modern platforms focused on issuing and processing gives us a deep moat of

technology, customer, and industry expertise. Our modern Platform offers multiple issuing and processing innovations, including open APIs, JIT Funding, and Tokenization as a Service. We continue to innovate on our Platform, and we believe that this innovation, coupled with our deep expertise, keeps us in a market-leading position.

Widening the Gap via Continuous Innovation: We believe that we continually increase our market-leading position by innovating on our flexible, agile, and extensible Platform to bring new use cases to market. As we partner with our existing Customers to support their ambitious global projects and develop cutting-edge use cases for each vertical, we also attract new Customers seeking best-in-class solutions. The highly configurable Marqeta Platform is agile out of the box and at scale. Our developer-centric APIs, sandboxes, and software development kits, or SDKs, written in modern programming languages, help our Customers go to market with unmatched speed. We offer that same flexibility and extensibility when Customer programs are live and in-market so that they can expand to new geographies and verticals. These unique characteristics make our Platform valuable to existing Customers and attractive to prospective Customers. We enable innovation that introduces opportunities for further innovation by Customers, creating a strong network effect that further cements and expands our market-leading position.

Enduring Customer Relationships: Our dollar-based net revenue retention was over 200% for each of the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, illustrating the strength and durability of our Customer relationships. We believe we are deeply integrated with our Customers in three ways: our technology underpins their core business or supports a core business process, our people become their trusted partners, and our solutions drive their key processes. Our Platform powers mission-critical experiences for our Customers, leading to strong relationships over time as we extend their reach both from a product and geographic perspective. We become technically integrated within their products and solutions, operationally integrated as Customers develop core processes around our tools and platform, and culturally integrated as our partnerships deepen over time. Indeed, our mutually beneficial contractual terms are designed to provide a win/win for both our Customers and us; as their businesses thrive, our net revenue grows.