Companies often need loans to fund operations, grow and even buy real estate. Those credit agreements come with hundreds of pages of rules and regulations that are manual, not transparent, and if compliance isn’t met, they can lose that funding.
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Enter Finley: The debt capital raise and management company brought in $3 million in seed funding to develop a platform that digitizes debt capital agreements and stores key dates so companies can more easily comply and perform ongoing reporting with their capital providers.
Jeremy Tsui, co-founder and CEO of Finley, his brother, Josiah Tsui, and friend Kevin Suh, co-founded the company in the summer of 2020. Jeremy had been a debt investor at Goldman Sachs and saw the pain points firsthand from companies trying to comply with their agreements.
“I was helping borrowers comply with the rules so they did not lose access to their funds,” Tsui told Crunchbase News. “When I took a step back to see what was at the heart of the problem, I saw how hard it was to comply.”
Compliance comes in different forms, he said. For example, companies may have to make sure five types of insurance in every state they operate in are up to date. They have to submit accounting statements on a weekly basis to show the cash-flow runway. If companies are using the debt facility to loan money to consumers, there can even be stipulations on the number of times money can be lent to one person in a month or in a certain state, Tsui said.
Instead, Finley’s software was designed to put the relationship between the company and the debt capital providers on autopilot to manage those compliance requirements without having to hire a team of lawyers and analysts.
The San Francisco-based company, which initially focused on fintech and real estate, and operates on a subscription basis, has annual contracts with five companies so far, according to Tsui.
Now backed by lead investor Bain Capital Ventures, which was joined by Haystack, Nine Four Ventures, TwentyTwo VC and Y Combinator, Finley intends to use the new funds to accelerate product development and hire engineers to join the founding team.
“In capital markets, credit is clearly having a moment,” said Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a written statement. “Low costs and creative products are driving enthusiastic borrower adoption, whether by startup teams financing lending, real estate, equipment and other assets, or corporate treasury executives adopting an alternative to bank finance. This is an exciting moment for us to partner with the Finley team, who have the right experience, vision and timing for a modern transaction, reporting, and management software for the future of debt capital markets.”
In addition to debt capital, Finley also launched credit facility management software so customers can manage compliance and reporting tasks without bringing on additional capital markets or data engineering personnel.
One of its first partners was spend management startup Ramp, which uses Finley’s software to automate reporting on its $150 million credit facility with Goldman Sachs, according to Ramp co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman.
“When we looked for off-the-shelf software solutions that could meet our needs, we couldn’t find one that could handle the nuances of our credit agreement,” Glyman said in a written statement. “Finley helps us minimize risk and saves our finance and engineering teams dozens of hours a month.”
Feature photo of co-founders Josiah Tsui, Jeremy Tsui and Kevin Suh courtesy of Finley.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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