9fin, a leading provider of data, news and predictive analytics for debt capital markets, has today announced an £8M Series A round to fuel its expansion into the US. The company is opening a New York office following increased demand from existing customers in Europe.
The latest investment was led by Redalpine, alongside previous investors in the company, Fly Ventures. Angel investors Paul Forster, Co-Founder of Indeed, and Alan Morgan, Co-Founder of MMC Ventures, also participated along with Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital and a number of high net worth individuals. To date 9fin has secured over £10M in funding, including backing from Seedcamp and AI Seed Fund.
Co-founded by Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh, long-time friends from University, 9fin was created to provide faster, smarter intelligence for the debt capital markets community. The inspiration for the venture came from the founders’ extensive industry experience of working within investment banking and financial technology respectively.
Steven Hunter, Co-Founder and CEO of 9fin, commented, “Debt capital markets is 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, that 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.”
Hunter continued, “We’re delighted to have the backing of new and existing investors in this round. The Redalpine team has a very strong track record of FinTech investments. We’re excited to welcome Aleksandra to our board, lending her capital markets and operational expertise to our team. In the last year we’ve used our analytics to predict multi-billion dollar deals, saved analysts hours of manual data extraction and allowed funds to spot lucrative trading opportunities. This fundraise will allow us to rapidly scale and bring similar benefits to new customers, asset classes and geographies.”
9fin’s tech platform uses machine learning and computer vision to extract and standardise debt capital markets data in real time. The company’s predictive analytics helps its customers save time, spot trading opportunities and increase their share of the $65bn of debt capital markets fees earned by advisors each year.
Within the last 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 Series A investment will be used to expand into the US market, with the company opening a New York-based office following strong client demand. Initial hiring in New York will focus on content, analytics and business operations. 9fin is also hiring across its sales, marketing, product and engineering teams. It expects to double its current team of 30 people before the end of the year.
Aleksandra Laska, Partner at Redalpine, added “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 continued, “As well as a very impressive product offering, the team has built powerful customer relationships with the largest financial institutions in the world. We’re excited to support them as they grow in the US market.”
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