London-based 9fin, an analytics platform for debt capital markets, announced a $23 million Series A+ led by new investor Spark Capital with participation from existing investors Redalpine, AI Seed, Seedcamp, 500 Startups, and Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital. Spark Capital General Partner, Alex Finkelstein, will join 9fin’s Board. The new capital will be used to scale the 9fin team, grow its presence in the US market and expand its product into new asset classes.
9fin’s mission is to organise the world’s leveraged finance information and make it accessible and useful through its data, news and predictive analytics platform. Leveraging proprietary machine learning and computer vision, 9fin is the faster, smarter way to find leveraged finance intelligence, centralising everything that’s needed to analyse a credit or win a mandate in one place.
To date, 9fin has raised nearly $37 million in total funding, including early investments from Fly Ventures, and several high-net-worth individuals, including co-founder of Indeed Paul Forster and co-founder of MMC Ventures Alan Morgan. Since 2021, the company has more than doubled its client base, tripled its team and quadrupled its ARR. 9fin’s recent success, customer demand and fresh capital spurred the opening of a new office in New York City, which will be led by CEO and co-founder, Steven Hunter. Hussam El-Sheikh, CTO and co-founder, will continue to lead the London office and all aspects of engineering.
“We didn’t set out to fundraise, but when we spoke with Alex and the team at Spark, they were incredibly enthusiastic about the business and their culture and operating experience is a great fit for us. So we decided to raise opportunistically and accelerate our US GTM timing,” said Hunter. “We’ve seen incredible success with our platform in Europe and are thrilled to expand in the US. With this round, we will grow our US team to more than 70 people with new hires planned across credit, legal and sales.”
Despite debt markets being the largest asset class in the world, market participants rely on antiquated technology for analysis. In 2021, annual spend on financial data increased to $36 billion (Burton Taylor) and annual fees for advising on debt transactions reached $75 billion (Refinitiv), twice the size of fees earned on M&A transactions and IPOs.
9fin’s platform makes incredibly complex information easy to search, filter and analyse. Helping subscribers win business, outperform their peers and save time. The company currently supports over 60 customers, including nine of the top 10 investment banks, four of the top five distressed debt advisors, 80% of European HY Sales & Trading desks and four of the top six law firms in debt capital markets.
“Debt capital market teams have been analysing data the same way since the 1980s. Information on companies which borrow debt is opaque, unstructured, and slow to be distributed,” said Finkelstein. “Steven, Hussam and the 9fin team are updating an industry that desperately needs it. They’ve made so much progress out of their London office, we’re excited to see them take on the US and continue growing with new customers.”
Aleksandra Laska, Partner at Redalpine, added, “We’ve seen 9fin go from strength to strength since we invested last year. They’ve delivered impressive revenue growth, significant product developments and added some outstanding talent to their team. They’re well placed to execute on their next stage of their vision, and we’re delighted to continue to support them.”
9fin is headquartered in London, with its new US office located in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The company was co-founded by Hunter and El-Sheikh, long-time friends from University.
— Press release
