London FinTech 9fin raises £19m for US growth

by James · December 12, 2022

FinTechInvestment

9fin, a debt capital markets analytics platform, has raised a £19m Series A+ round.

Led by new investor Spark Capital with participation from existing investors Redalpine, AI Seed, Seedcamp, 500 Startups and Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital, it will be used to scale the 9fin team, increase its presence in the US market and expand the product to new assets classes.

Spark Capital’s general partner Alex Finkelstein will join 9fin’s board.

9fin’s mission is to organize the world’s leveraged financial information and make it accessible and useful through its data, news and predictive analytics platform powered by proprietary machine learning and computer vision.

To date, 9fin has raised nearly $37 million in total funding including early stage investment from Fly Ventures, and a number of high net worth individuals including co-founder of Indeed Paul Forster and co-founder of MMC Ventures Alan Morgan.

Since 2021, the company has more than doubled its customer base, tripled its team and quadrupled its ARR.

A new office in New York City will be led by CEO and co-founder Steven Hunter. Hussam El-Sheikh, CTO and co-founder, will continue to lead the London office and all aspects of engineering.

Starling Bank will employ 1,000 people at the new Manchester base

“We didn’t set out to raise money, but when we spoke to Alex and the team at Spark, they were incredibly enthusiastic about the business and their culture and operational experience is a great fit for us. So we decided to opportunistically increase and accelerate our US GTM timing,” Hunter said.

“We have seen incredible success with our platform in Europe and are excited to expand in the US. With this round, we will expand our US team to more than 70 people with new hires planned across credit, legal and sales.”

9fin says its platform makes incredibly complex information easy to search, filter and analyze, helping subscribers win business, outperform their peers and save time.

The company currently supports over 60 clients, including nine of the top 10 investment banks, four of the top five debt advisors, 80% of European HY Sales & Trading offices and four of the top six debt capital markets law firms.

“Debt capital markets teams have been analyzing data in the same way since the 1980s. Information about companies borrowing debt is opaque, unstructured and slow to distribute, Finkelstein said.

“Steven, Hussam and the 9fin team are refreshing an industry that desperately needs it. They’ve made so much progress from their London office, we’re excited to see them take on the US and continue to grow with new clients.”