ScribeUp, a Los Angeles fintech, has raised $13 million in a Series A round to bring subscription canceling powered by AI agents into banking apps, according to a report from K-EnterTech Hub. Customers can now deal with that forgotten charge without leaving the app where they already manage their money.
The round is part of a bigger fight. Personal finance apps and third-party AI assistants have been using bill management as a way in to win customers. ScribeUp is betting on the opposite path and sells that same capability to the banks themselves. For anyone building financial products or working with automation in Brazil, the case shows where the battle for customer attention is heating up.
Who invested and how much
The round was led by Curql Collective, an investment fund backed by credit unions, with participation from Mucker Capital and Service Ventures. According to K-EnterTech Hub, the money breaks down into $10 million in equity and $3 million in venture debt. The news came out on October 20, during Money20/20 in Las Vegas.
It is the first raise for the company since its $3 million seed round with Mucker Capital in August 2023. The outlet says the new money will go toward AI-driven insights, features that take action on their own, hiring and sales expansion.
How the product works
The tool runs inside the app of a bank, credit union or digital bank. From there, a customer can cancel a subscription they had forgotten about, move a recurring charge to another card or get an alert before a bill pushes the balance below zero.
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The jump in scale stands out. When the company launched in 2020, the product tracked a few hundred of the most common merchants. Today, with AI agents, it monitors about 200,000 different billers, based on Banking Dive data cited by K-EnterTech Hub. More than 60 banks, credit unions, fintechs and digital banks already use the solution, which can be added through an SDK, iframe or API and comes connected to the major digital banking platforms.
The next steps go beyond canceling subscriptions. The report describes features that should also switch payment methods and rearrange overdraft limits or loan payments, all inside the banking app. The ScribeUp thesis is that third-party apps lack the full banking context, such as balance, cash flow, payment dates and the products of the institution itself.
CEO and cofounder Jordan Mackler summed up the idea in the announcement, according to the outlet: recurring payments are the most frequent interaction people have with money and, at the same time, the least understood. In his view, showing the charges is not enough. The bank needs to resolve them. Nick Evens, CEO of Curql, said the tool helps institutions avoid losing that relationship to outside apps.
A forgotten $350 bill
The idea came from a nasty surprise. In 2020, Mackler was studying at MIT and coaching football for Yohei Oka, a student from Tokyo who is now cofounder and CTO of the company. Oka signed up for YouTube TV and ESPN+, forgot about both during the semester and watched $350 leave his account.
He is far from alone. K-EnterTech Hub points to a 2022 survey by C+R Research, reported by CNBC, of 1,000 American consumers. When given ten seconds to guess how much they spent each month on subscriptions, people estimated $86 on average. Their real spending was well above that. And many people in the survey admitted that recurring charges are easy to forget.
The rules changed the picture
The regulatory backdrop helps explain the bet. In the United States, the FTC rule that would have required companies to make canceling as easy as signing up was struck down by a federal appeals court on July 8, 2025, six days before it was set to take effect, on procedural grounds. According to the report, the issue now depends on state laws and the policies of each company.
Distribution matters too. Curql, backed by more than 160 credit unions, gives its members discounts and early access to the fintechs in its portfolio. One of them, Advia Credit Union, announced it was adopting ScribeUp in February 2026, according to the outlet.
What this teaches fintechs and automation startups in Brazil
This section is an editorial reading of the case, not a fact from the report.
Sell to whoever already has the customer. ScribeUp is not trying to pull users away from banks. It hands the technology to them. If you are thinking about B2B2C models, this is worth a close look: sometimes the shortest road to the consumer runs through an institution they already use every day.
Agents that solve, not just warn. A dashboard listing your charges helps, but canceling with one tap is a different story. This kind of edge shows up across many industries, as the trend of AI agents taking over business automation makes clear. If you are still choosing your own path, the debate over whether to build or buy AI agents for automation is a good place to start, because that is exactly the choice a bank makes when it signs up for a ready-made solution.
A strategic investor opens doors. Here, the Curql network seems to be worth as much as the check. A fund tied to the very customers of the product shortens the sales cycle.
A simple, universal pain. A forgotten subscription is a problem anyone gets in seconds. That tends to make the pitch, the sale and the talks with investors a lot easier.
The recurring payments layer has become contested ground between banks, personal finance apps and AI assistants. To follow similar moves, it is also worth seeing how Aina raised $5.5 million to control AI agents.
