Announcing our newest Senior Partner: Nick Talwar
We are thrilled to announce that we have brought on Nick Talwar as a Senior Partner to lead investments focused on embedded financial solutions and expand our reach and community in SE Asia and India. Nick has had a career exemplified by his passion for driving financial and societal impact through purpose-built tech companies. We are delighted to have a profoundly mission-aligned partner with 20+ years of experience building alongside the world’s best talent at Citi, Visa, Amazon, Uber and most recently as the CEO of CircleUp. Welcome Nick!!
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining K50 Ventures as a Senior Partner. For the past decade, and mostly as a side hustle, I’ve been investing in a number of promising companies building solutions for the mass market and micro/small businesses. Early into my work as a direct investor, I knew I was hooked.
When I decided to leave CircleUp as president and CEO last year, my priorities were clear: I wanted to commit full-time to invest in the future of finance and work where new technology-driven business models could transform people’s lives at scale.
This journey has led me to K50, which makes early-stage investments in founders driving access and affordability for nearly four billion middle-class consumers and SMEs. So far, the firm has had impressive results, generating a 59% gross IRR since it was founded seven years ago.
It’s no secret that the present age is defined by deepening inequality. Currently, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just 2% of global wealth while the richest 10% own 76%. Into this equation, the venture industry has funded thousands of companies that cater almost exclusively to the affluent; In 2020, only 2% of invested dollars went to businesses that have a social mission. While many of these venture-backed companies have made our lives increasingly convenient, they continue to overlook the most crucial needs of the majority of people.
Entrenched, systemic problems remain: many people can’t afford the products and tools required to earn a living wage, and nearly 1.4 billion people are shut out from basic financial services. These issues disproportionately affect the most vulnerable members of society, including women, the less educated, and those living in rural areas.
This is a pernicious problem that demands bold solutions. Technology has the power to tip the scale in favor of people who have historically been shut out from both wage-creating opportunities and financial management.
One of the most groundbreaking opportunities today lies in embedded finance, a field that provides new ways to assess financial trustworthiness. Rather than relying on physical bank interactions, credit scores, and formal employment verification to determine credibility, embedded finance offers entirely new ways to gauge customers’ banking eligibility. By analyzing behaviors, movement, and relationships through unique data insights and seamlessly integrating with customers in the places where they are already living their (often digital) lives, a massive, underserved customer base is unlocked, most notably within emerging markets that often lack critical financial infrastructure.
My work at K50 will be a continuation of the work I’ve already been deeply involved in at a smaller scale over the past few years. As an individual investor, I’ve had the privilege of working hands-on with founders who are helping millions of people gain access to credit, smartphones, and reliable transportation.
Payjoy, a company I’ve been on the board of since 2017, provides smartphone financing with a device lock to people who can’t afford to buy a smartphone outright. Shipper created critical shipping infrastructure for small, online vendors in Indonesia to better facilitate digital commerce. Fishlog, another Indonesia-based company, is transforming the local fishing industry with an online marketplace directly connecting fishermen to corner shops that buy fish and cut out costly middlemen. The company also provides future price predictions and affordable lending so fishermen can wait to sell their stock, and has reduced the average amount of fish lost by 25% through its data-driven cold storage system. Travclan is digitizing the 300,000 largely offline Indian travel agents, supporting them with greater inventory, customer management tools, financing, insurance, and forex solutions.
Many of the insights that have been most useful for these and other founders have been through the experiences I gained working at bigger tech companies like Amazon, Uber, and CircleUp.
When we started Amazon Lending, a staggering 50% of small businesses on Amazon’s marketplace didn’t have access to credit from traditional financial institutions. Through Amazon’s program, small business owners in the United Kingdom, United States, India, and Japan were granted loans that provided vital growth for thousands of online vendors who otherwise would have been excluded from low-interest financing — and because these loans were tied to performance on the marketplace platform losses remained low and engagement very high.
At Uber, I led a team that helped drivers around the world access vehicles so they could make money by driving for Uber. Many of these people were in tenuous situations looking for flexible work but didn’t have the cash up-front to pay for a car. In addition to providing vehicles in exchange for work, Uber’s program allowed them to acquire financing, leasing, and loans.
At CircleUp, we used data from thousands of alternative data sources to traditional bureaus to identify and invest in small, top-performing consumer companies that often struggled to acquire financial backing from traditional investors.
In all three of these cases, we offered a range of products and wage-earning opportunities to people who otherwise would have been excluded from low-interest financing, car loans, and investment capital through the targeted use of software and data computation.
These experiences have further reinforced my conviction that investing on behalf of the mass market and small businesses is an enormous opportunity with tremendous social impact. A new wave of great finance companies is emerging, and they have the opportunity to revolutionize finance for the majority of the world’s population. I’m excited to see where my future collaborations with founders in this space will lead.
If you’re building and/or investing in the future of finance and work or would like to learn more about what we’re doing at K50 Ventures, please feel free to reach me at nick@k50ventures.com
