The most successful companies in vertical markets pair product innovation with go-to-market disruption. In this series we explore that marriage, how companies many have never heard of came to dominate their markets, and how they scaled with distinct tactics. These history lessons inform what we look for when investing in vertical markets at Scale Venture Partners, and hopefully provide blueprints for the next generation of vertical market winners.
Company name: nCino
Founder: Pierre Naude, Pullen Daniel, Nathan Snell, Neil Underwood, and James S. Mahan III
Year founded: 2011
Company vertical: Banking software
Market dominance: Lending operations
What do they actually do: nCino provides a cloud-based operating system for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. Its software is designed to streamline and automate core banking operations, including lending, account opening, treasury management, mortgages, and the myriad of back office workflows behind them. It is the system that a bank employee uses to manage and understand most of the transactions a bank undergoes with its customers.
Banks have a variety of channels for their customers. nCino works across physical branches, call centers, mobile, and online. They also can support commercial, small business, consumer, and corporate banking, which each have nuances requiring dedicated functionality. It provides one platform that unifies a bank’s operations and eliminates inefficient manual workflows. Over time they’ve continued to broaden the platform and embed AI everywhere.
Product innovation: While there is concentration of locations amongst the top US largest banks, there is also a massive long-tail of regional and community banks and credit unions (close to 10,000). The top banks have large IT budgets and can build out sophisticated tech stacks themselves. The long-tail does not have that luxury. These smaller financial institutions face a complex technology landscape with outdated prem-based systems, insufficient homegrown tooling, and lots of fragmentation within an organization (incredibly siloed across customer channels and banking products). This created inefficiencies, increased operational costs, and inconsistent customer experiences, resulting in the long-tail banks facing an existential crisis as customers shifted to the largest banks. In 2009, Live Oak Bank (a midsized community bank), felt this exact pain around their lending practice and began an engineering endeavor that two years later would spin out as nCino.
nCino gave these financial institutions a unified platform to connect the customer experience across channels and departments. Its core focus on loan automation not only increased back office efficiency, but also increased the loan velocity by delivering a faster and better experience. Instead of forcing a rip-and-replace, nCino integrated with existing CRMs and core banking providers, allowing them to modernize operations without completely overhauling their tech stack. It was a game changer in an industry hesitant to adopt new technology.
nCino has continuously broadened its digital banking operating system through a series of strategic moves that built on its core lending solution. In 2019 nCino acquired Visible Equity and Finsuite to enhance its portfolio management, analytics and compliance capabilities. In 2021 nCino acquired SimpleNexus, allowing them to extend the platform to cover mortgages. As recently as February 2025, nCino acquired Sandbox Banking to augment their data connectivity offering. This deliberate, chronological buildup of capabilities through acquisitions has transformed nCino into a powerful all in one solution for banks and credit unions, solidifying its leadership position.
Scaling magic moment: Given that nCino started as an internal R&D project at a community bank, it gave it instant credibility in a customer space that was historically conservative at buying software. They utilized the tag line built by bankers, for bankers which resonated with their customers and enabled them to land an initial set of customers that were of similar size to Live Oak Bank. The banking world tends to have a herd mentality, so it’s tough to crack, but once a peer bank has adopted, the next bank follows suit. This spiral slowly moved upmarket over time allowing nCino to land larger and larger customers, eventually cracking even the top 100 global banks. Simultaneously, nCino built an attractive bundle of solutions spanning multiple types of end customers and incremental functionality. This was done in part organically as well as with six targeted acquisitions to accelerate this expansion.
Where are they now: nCino IPO’d in 2020 and is currently a $3.5B public company. They serve over 1,850 financial institutions across 16 countries, including many of the top 25 global banks. They’ve been incredibly successful at expanding inside customers with ~50% of customers utilizing more than 1 product and massive ACVs – ~500 customers spend more than $100k and ~100 customers spend more than $1M. With close to $500 million in annual revenue nCino is one of the leading cloud banking platforms, continues to expand its offerings, and is embedding AI throughout its applications.