London-based 9fin, an analytics platform for debt capital markets, announced on Thursday that it has raised $23M (approximately €21.74M) in a Series A+ round of funding led by new investor Spark Capital. Existing investors Redalpine, AI Seed, Seedcamp, 500 Startups, and Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital also participated in this round.
With this investment, Spark Capital General Partner, Alex Finkelstein, will join 9fin’s Board.
Finkelstein says, “Debt capital market teams have been analysing data the same way since the 1980s. Information on companies which borrow debt is opaque, unstructured, and slow to be distributed. Steven, Hussam and the 9fin team are updating an industry that desperately needs it. They’ve made so much progress out of their London office, we’re excited to see them take on the US and continue growing with new customers.”
In October 2021, 9fin raised £8M (then, approx €9.4M) in its Series A round of funding to fuel its expansion in the US market. To date, the company has raised nearly $37M in total funding, including early investments from Fly Ventures and a number of high-net-worth individuals like co-founder of Indeed Paul Forster and co-founder of MMC Ventures Alan Morgan.
Capital utilisation
9fin says it will use the funds to scale its team, grow its presence in the US market, and expand its product into new asset classes.
9fin CEO and co-founder, Steven Hunter, says, “We didn’t set out to fundraise, but when we spoke with Alex and the team at Spark, they were incredibly enthusiastic about the business and their culture and operating experience is a great fit for us. So we decided to raise opportunistically and accelerate our US GTM timing. We’ve seen incredible success with our platform in Europe and are thrilled to expand in the US. With this round, we will grow our US team to more than 70 people with new hires planned across credit, legal and sales.”
“The faster, smarter way to find leveraged finance intelligence”
Founded in 2016 by Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh, 9fin aims to organise the world’s leveraged financial information and make it accessible and usable. Through an AI-powered data and analytics platform, the company centralises everything that’s required to assess a credit or win a mandate from one location using machine learning and computer vision.
Through its platforms, 9fin offers products such as news alerts, financials, covenants, comparables, deal predictions, ESG, restructuring, and search.
9fin says its platform makes it simple to search, filter, and analyse extremely complicated data, helping subscribers win business, save time and perform better than their competitors.
Currently, the company services over 60 clients, including four of the top five distressed debt consultants, 80 per cent of the European HY Sales & Trading desks, and four of the top six law firms in the debt capital markets, in addition to nine of the top ten investment banks.
Since 2021, the company’s clientele has more than doubled, and it has tripled its workforce size and quadrupled its ARR. The company will also create a new office in New York City, which will be fueled by 9fin’s recent success, client demand, and new funding. The London office and all engineering responsibilities will continue to be overseen by Hussam El-Sheikh.
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