Credit card distribution startup Extend sees a $400 billion market opportunity in eliminating out-of-pocket spending for business expenses through the instant issuance of virtual company credit cards.

Andrew Jamison, CEO and co-founder of Extend, said this opportunity will only grow as small businesses through large corporates increasingly turn to gig economy workers to meet their needs. He noted that there could be as many as 50 million gig economy workers in the U.S. next year, but there are few options for them to pay for business expenses that come up on a daily basis.

With big-name startups like Brex, Stripe, and Marqeta in the commercial card space, Extend is carving out its niche by partnering with top tier banks, thereby eliminating the requirement for customers to open a new account. Jamison said Extend partners with issuers rather than positioning itself as a potential disruptor because the reality is companies don’t want to change their banking relationship. From the start, Extend has looked to leverage existing rails and existing credit that companies already had earned with their banks and to merely be able to extend that instantly to employees and contractors, he explained.

Extend’s push in the market comes at a time when virtual cards, which have been around for years, are in the spotlight again, thanks to collaborations like that between Apple, Goldman Sachs and Mastercard to build the Apple Card. Apple announced the card in March, touting zero fees and low interest rates, as well as the ability to sign up in the Wallet app on a user’s iPhone and use it immediately.

Extend essentially sells a technology platform to credit card issuers that sits on top of their legacy systems and allows their corporate clients to share company credit cards with employees. Rather than using their personal credit cards for business-related purchases and waiting to get reimbursed, an employee can download the Extend app and charge to a virtual company credit card that can be issued instantly and without employers having to expose their card number and details. “We’re not moving money,” Jamison said. “We’re moving access to credit.”

Extend, which is integrated with Mastercard and Visa, currently offers the app as well as a suite of APIs for incumbents and startups to leverage virtual credit cards. Consumer applications are on the horizon as well, the company noted.

Andy Brown, CEO of tech advisory firm Sand Hill East and former CTO of UBS, said Extend’s advantage is that its use cases and potential use cases require little explanation. “There are many, many uses — corporate uses, for sure — in SMB, but I personally would like to use that to restrict my children’s spend on subscription-based applications,” he said. “When you can see use cases that are that easy, you know there’s a market.”

Jamison said Extend currently has four U.S. bank partners — known partners include Silicon Valley Bank and City National Bank — and expects to have at least 15 bank partners, including two international institutions, by the end of next year. He added that the company plans to grow from 15 employees to 40 employees — largely in engineering, marketing and operations — over the same period.

Extend graduated today from the ninth class of Accenture’s and the Partnership Fund for New York City’s FinTech Innovation Lab. Prior to founding Extend, Jamison worked at American Express for 12 years and managed all of the firm’s business-to-business payments solutions, including virtual card platforms and products. His co-founders hail from American Express and Capital One.