Christine Hall / 3:01 am PST • January 31, 2023
As venture capital investments slowed down in 2022, some startups turned to private credit, including debt capital, as a way to supplement their operations in the meantime. However, the policies and procedures paperwork that goes with these deals aren’t always easy to understand.
Finley CEO Jeremy Tsui told TechCrunch that private credit is a $1.2 trillion industry and accounts for 90% of all corporate debt in the middle-market. However, while working in debt capital at Goldman Sachs, he witnessed two things: private credit, or lending by non-bank parties, filling the gap for banks making fewer corporate loans, and then companies finding it challenging to understand the hundreds of pages in their agreements.
“With consumer credit, we’ve seen a lot of innovation, but business credit or business lending has really been stuck in the past,” he said.
That’s when he came together with his brother, Josiah Tsui, and friend Kevin Suh in 2020 to create Finley, a software company that helps clients manage their private credit loans, turning hundreds of pages of documents into digestible bites, including storing key dates, so that companies taking these kinds of loans can more easily comply with the loan terms and reporting requirements.
Finley raised $3 million back in 2021 and has now closed on $17 million in Series A capital after spending the past two years focused on…