#PowerToTheCFO — Effortless Debt Capital Solutions for Scaling Businesses and Why CRV Led the Investment in Finley’s Series A
By James Green
From our first meeting with the Finley team at San Francisco’s Sightglass Coffee shop in March 2021, to discuss their plans coming out of Y Combinator, we were immediately impressed by their vision to reimagine and tackle one of the biggest problems in debt financing. I won’t reveal all the secrets, but we were enamored from day one at how they envisioned managing private credit and capital structures.
Today, not quite two years in the future, we are delighted to announce that CRV is leading Finley’s $17M Series A round alongside Bain Capital Ventures, Nine Four Ventures, Haystack, Y Combinator and a host of amazing angel investors.
Venture investing is a funny business because as investors we meet thousands of companies each year and hear compelling visions on how people will change their respective industries. Alongside those visions we hear about projections, plans, potential deals that, “will, of course, close this quarter” and many other things. Turns out, not all of those things come true. With Finley, while early, they are on track to do everything they said they would accomplish during that first meeting.
In late March, the Finley team pitched a software platform to empower capital markets teams through automation, workflow and analytics. By giving visibility into the trillions of dollars in the private credit market, a software platform could become the key system of record for companies who need to manage their debt. While still early, this is happening with many of Finley’s early customers. One customer said,
“We’re using Finley to interface with the lenders and we heavily built accounting and tracking all around Finley…Managing debt is so time consuming and expensive issue and we love them.”
Other Finley customers are building core teams around their platform and, in a new capital constrained environment, lenders love the automation and safety net that Finley gives for their borrowers.
The team serves happy well known customers like Ramp, Parafin and many more businesses that have to manage their private credit. While the Finley team kick started with leading technology companies, we envision a world where companies across numerous industries rely on Finley’s mission critical software.
The Finley team is made up of talent from across some of the best companies in Silicon Valley and traditional finance. They have experience from businesses like Goldman Sachs, Ironclad, Nova Credit, Blend, Twilio and many others. The founder market fit of the respective three founders is amazing for this problem set and we are so excited to partner with them.
The world has become more accustomed to managing equity documents, issuing, ownership, etc., but the world of debt continues to be left in the past. Gathering required documents for lenders, reporting ongoing performance, repayments, compliance, etc. is all extremely manual and usually in the hands of Excel, legacy systems and left to the whims of human error. We see the product at Finley as a step to bringing this debt ecosystem into the 21st century.
Finley joins CRV’s robust fintech portfolio which includes the likes of Jeeves, Karat, Mercury, Vergo and Zip and we are so excited to partner with the team. CRV is an early stage venture capital firm that has backed over 500 startups in its 50 plus year history, including Airtable, DoorDash, Postman, Verceland Zip. The firm focuses on investing in seed and Series A companies across the enterprise and consumer landscapes. If you’re an early stage founder and looking for funding around an ambitious fintech idea, come meet our team. We’d be delighted to discuss what your company is up to and possibly even partner with you.
