LA Entertainment Tech Startups: Banks move to own the cancel button

ScribeUp raises $13 million Series A led by Curql… agentic AI tracks some 200,000 billers inside 60-plus banking apps

ScribeUp, a Los Angeles fintech that builds subscription and bill management into digital banking apps, has raised a $13 million Series A. The company announced the round on Oct. 20 to coincide with Money20/20 in Las Vegas. Curql Collective, a fintech investor funded by credit unions, led the round, with Mucker Capital and Service Ventures participating.

Inside a bank, credit union or neobank app, ScribeUp lets customers cancel a forgotten subscription, move a recurring charge to a different card or get a warning before a bill overdraws an account. dot.LA covered the raise on Oct. 23 under the headline “Your Bank Wants to Cancel Your Subscriptions.”

$10 million equity, $3 million venture debt… first raise since 2023 seed

The round combines $10 million of equity with a $3 million venture debt facility. It is ScribeUp’s first raise since a $3 million seed from Mucker Capital in August 2023. The company said the money will fund AI-native analytics and “agentic” execution features, hiring and go-to-market expansion.

ScribeUp funding by round. Of the $13 million Series A, $3 million is venture debt

When ScribeUp was founded in 2020, its product could follow a few hundred of the most common merchants. With agentic AI it now tracks about 200,000 unique subscription billers, Banking Dive reported. Financial institutions can deploy it through an SDK, an iframe or an API, and it is pre-integrated with major digital banking platforms. More than 60 banks, credit unions, fintechs and neobanks use it.

‘The difference between a dashboard and a relationship’

“Recurring payments are the most frequent interaction a consumer has with their money and the one consumers understand the least,” Jordan Mackler, ScribeUp’s CEO and co-founder, said in the announcement. “ScribeUp gives financial institutions the ability to not only surface subscriptions and bills, but to resolve them directly from their banking experience. That’s the difference between a dashboard and a relationship. Institutions that win the recurring layer win a user’s spend and banking primacy.”

Nick Evens, president and CEO of Curql, said ScribeUp helps institutions keep that relationship from shifting to outside consumer apps by putting AI-powered bill control inside the banking experience. “ScribeUp has built strong momentum by solving a clear and growing problem at the intersection of banking, payments and recurring financial activity,” said Will Hsu, founding partner at Mucker Capital. Brian Regan, general partner at Service Ventures, said his conviction came from using the product himself and seeing the value it created for members and credit unions.

Curql is backed by more than 160 credit unions. It closed its second fund at $360 million in August 2025, following a $252 million first fund in 2021. ScribeUp formed its own credit union service organization (CUSO) in June 2025, with New Hampshire’s Service Credit Union as its first strategic investor. In data released with the CUSO launch, Service Credit Union members moved an average of $72 a month in recurring spend from outside accounts to their Service CU accounts.

A $350 streaming bill… consumers guess 39% of what they actually spend

The company traces back to a forgotten streaming bill. In 2020, while Mackler was at MIT, he taught American football to Yohei Oka, a student from Tokyo who is now ScribeUp’s co-founder and CTO. Oka signed up for YouTube TV and ESPN+, lost track of them during the semester and saw $350 leave his account. Optimizing billing relationships, Mackler concluded, is too much work for individuals.

Surveys point the same way. In a 2022 C+R Research study of 1,000 U.S. consumers, people asked to estimate their monthly subscription spending in 10 seconds guessed $86 on average; the actual figure was $219, CNBC reported. Seventy-four percent said recurring charges are easy to forget.

Estimated vs. actual monthly subscription spending among U.S. consumers

U.S. click-to-cancel rule vacated; Korea regulates billing through e-commerce law

The Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule, which would have required businesses to make cancelling as easy as signing up, was vacated by the Eighth Circuit on July 8, 2025, six days before it was to take effect, on procedural grounds. Cancellation rules now rest with state laws and company policies.

South Korea took a seller-side route. Its amended Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce (전자상거래법), in force since Feb. 14, 2025, requires consent before a recurring charge rises or a free trial converts to paid, and bans six types of dark patterns, including obstructing cancellation. The rules cover recurring billing at Korean streaming services, music apps and shopping memberships. They govern each seller’s own checkout and cancel flow; viewing and cutting charges across many services in one place is left to financial apps of the kind ScribeUp supplies.

A 160-credit-union network… from alerts to actions

Curql offers its member credit unions discounts and early access to portfolio fintechs, which ties ScribeUp to more than 160 credit unions. Adonsin and Illinois, announced a ScribeUp rollout in February 2026

The agentic features the new money will fund are meant to take action inside the banking app: cancelling subscriptions, switching payment methods and rebalancing overdraft lines or loan repayments. ScribeUp says banking context — balances, cash flow, payment timing and an institution’s own products — is what third-party personal finance apps lack. As AI assistants and PFM apps use bill management as an entry point to customers, ScribeUp is selling the same capability to the banks.