9fin, a provider of data, news, and predictive analytics for debt capital markets, announced that it has raised £8M (approx €9.4M) in a Series A round of funding to fuel its expansion into the US market.
Who invested?
The investment round was led by Redalpine, alongside previous investors in the company, including Fly Ventures. Redalpine is a seed and early-stage venture investor. It invests in disruptive technologies with a focus on highly scalable ICT and Health Tech models. It supports over 70+ portfolio companies, including N26, Robinhood, Zenjob, sennder, among others.
Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed, Alan Morgan, co-founder of MMC Ventures, Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital, and several high net worth individuals also participated in the round. To date, the UK company has secured over £10M (approx €11.7M) in funding.
Fund utilisation
The company claims that it will use the funds to expand into the US market, opening an office in New York. 9fin says that initial hiring in New York will focus on content, analytics, and business operations.
The company expects to double its current team of 30 people before the end of the year. It is also hiring across its sales, marketing, product, and engineering teams.
Steven Hunter, co-founder, and CEO of 9fin, says, “Debt capital markets are the world’s largest asset class, but it operates using the worst quality data, information, and technology. Many companies in this space aren’t large listed businesses, they’re privately owned, which means important information about them isn’t readily or easily available.”
“When I worked in banking and asset management, I felt like I’d been teleported back 40 years in terms of the data and technology our market used. Finding simple things like earnings, price-sensitive news flow, and key offering documents was incredibly painful. 9fin was created to fix that,” he added.
Redalpine: What you need to know
A European early-stage VC investor, Redalpine supports 70+ portfolio companies with financial investment, its in-house operational and subject matter expertise, and extensive international network.
As a part of the funding round, Aleksandra Laska, Partner at Redalpine, will join 9fin’s board of directors.
“We are delighted to back Steven and Huss, they’re an incredibly driven team who have the ambition, network, and know-how to turn 9fin into a massive business. They have deep industry expertise in debt capital markets and have experienced the pain of poor-quality information first-hand. Faster, better-quality data has huge value within this space. Whether that’s predictive analytics to spot new business opportunities or freeing up an analyst team’s time through automating the manual collection of data,” Laska said.
Debt capital markets community
Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh founded 9fin in 2016 to provide ‘faster and smarter’ intelligence for the debt capital markets community.
Based out of London, 9fin uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to extract crucial information and standardise debt capital markets data in real-time. By making data easy to search, filter, and analyse, 9fin claims to help fixed-income professionals make smarter decisions.
In the past year, the company has quadrupled its number of clients, tripled the size of its team, and partnered with the European Leveraged Finance Association on legal data and analytics.
The company already counts nine of the top 10 investment banks in Europe as its clients and works with asset managers, hedge funds, legal and advisory firms.
9fin’s product offerings include news alerts, financials, covenants, comparables, deal predictions, ESG, and search.
9fin’s previous developments
In June, 9fin expanded its content and analytics team and appointed Caitlin Carey as Senior Covenant Analyst and Jack Davis as ESG Analyst.
Caitlin will focus on expanding 9fin’s Legals product offering while Jack will focus on producing independent ESG analysis and developing ESG capabilities of the 9fin platform.
In February, the UK company had announced a partnership with the European Leveraged Finance Association (ELFA). The partnership allows ELFA members to benefit from 9fin’s expertise in covenants and related market trends.
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