We’re pumped to announce our newest investment in Finley’s $17M Series A led by CRV! Nine Four Ventures is excited and fortunate for the opportunity to deepen its partnership with Jeremy and the Finley team, and to continue supporting them on their mission to build a category-defining debt capital management platform. Here is a bit more about the business, opportunity, and why we re-invested.
Finley is a debt capital management platform. It offers a critical piece of back-end capital markets infrastructure that digitizes on-going financial operations and reporting between lenders and business borrowers with a cloud-native, integrated platform purpose-built for finance teams. Finley’s approach is changing the debt capital management process from being historically reactive to proactive. Jeremy, Josiah, Kevin, and the team watched the debt capital markets evolve: rapid inflation and rising interest rates created constraints and exposed industry-wide operational inefficiencies.
As a result, startup founders and middle-market executives began running into new, more acute cash management challenges that increased pressure and scrutiny on finance teams. Prior to Finley, there were few alternatives, and many teams were forced to rely on static workflows that traditionally involved spreadsheets and left them vulnerable to costly human errors and expensive covenant violations. The previous paradigm created a parallel challenge of needing to scale a business and a capital markets function simultaneously and wasn’t set up to handle modern-day debt capital market complexities at fast growing startups or lenders with large portfolios. It was hard, but it no longer has to be with Finley. Customers now have a new scalable, “capital-markets-as-a-service” platform with dynamic risk controls to help manage their debt more efficiently, while also reducing their capital risk.
Platforms like Finley allow borrowers and lenders to meaningfully improve scalability. While Finley found product-market fit with venture-backed borrowers, it’s subsequently expanding to lenders and helping them manage entire portfolios. This could be game-changing because lenders have unique influence over the flow of funds to and software used by downstream stakeholders. Also, the advantages of Finley’s product are beginning to be discovered in the enterprise segment – an exciting expansion beyond its startup borrower initial core focus. These segments are massive, and the potential benefits of capital markets improvements are significant.
Finley’s opportunity extends beyond software and into FinTech and marketplaces. It has unique visibility into the financial performance of borrowers across industries and segments, and can create debt capital marketplaces to more intelligently connect supply and demand. These additional products and services can further improve cash flow management and reduce risks for customers (i.e. borrowers and lenders) while increasing wallet share and improving already strong retention and customer experiences.
Finley and the team’s progress since the Seed round is impressive. They’re executing on an aggressive plan, launching new products, and discovering new use cases in nascent segments. Although Finley has accomplished a lot in a short period of time, there’s plenty of work for them to do. We’re in for an exciting next few years as the company’s rapid growth and pace of innovation continues. If you’re a lender or borrower interested in learning more, please reach out. And if you’re interested in contributing to making debt capital market run more efficiently, Finley is hiring!
