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🌞 Happy Thursday, y'all. Retail and institutional credit analysis tools top the news today. 

🤨 Situational awareness: Former Synapse CEO Sankaet Pathak has a new robotics startup that has a $10 million commitment from Tribe Capital. 

Findigs, a rental screening startup, raised $27 million in Series B funding led by Nyca Partners, the company tells Lucinda exclusively.

Why it matters: Property managers and owners are reporting a surge in rental fraud at a time when high rental costs remain a major concern for U.S. federal economists.

Zoom in: The company has raised $47 million since its founding in 2020.

Other investors in the round include RPM Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Expa Ventures, Activant Capital, Colle Capital and Frontier Venture Capital.

How it works: The rental market focuses heavily on credit scores as a proxy for tenants' ability to pay. Findigs uses a more holistic set of data, while streamlining the process onto one platform, CEO Steve Carroll says.

The tool may use a mix of credit checks, criminal eviction checks, criminal checks, income verification via API, and pet verification. (Findigs might use AI to interpret veterinary documents on the breed, as some buildings restrict what kinds of pets are allowed.)

Property managers and owners set parameters for what kind of tenants they want. Findigs bases its checks on those criteria to get a result — and even a recommendation based on the customer's rules — to the property owner or manager within the day.

Findigs makes $40 to $80 per tenant. The company says it has processed close to a million applications.

Carroll says Findigs differentiates itself by reviewing all cases directly and eliminating the need for property managers to conduct their own reviews.

Context: About 70% of apartment owners and managers surveyed by the National Multifamily Housing Council say they experienced an increase in fraudulent applications and payments, according to the report published in January.

About 85% said applicants falsified or fabricated paystubs or other forms of income documentation.

What's next: As it adds proprietary data, Findigs envisions developing a better underwriting system, one that may use more historical rent payment data.

It also has big ambitions to be a more consumer-facing platform, where users can search for new homes or movers, says Carroll.

That doesn't necessarily mean becoming a search platform, but it could mean partnering with existing rental marketplaces.

Findigs could also cross-sell products like rental insurance or security deposit alternatives.

State of play: Other tenant screening platforms include TransUnion's SmartMove screening site and RentPrep, which Roofstock acquired in 2022.

The bottom line: Startups focusing on the 35%-plus of U.S. households that rent have seen significant support.

Bilt notably raised $200 million at the start of the year, rent rewards company Atlas raised $1.6 million in June, and Leasecake raised a $10 million extension in April.

"Rent is in a different realm of needs — needing a roof over your head is very fundamental," says Nyca's Jeremy Solomon. 

Renter screening platform Findigs raises $27M

Illustration of a house with a keyboard and mouse

EnFi, which is building a credit analysis and risk monitoring platform, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, its founders tell Ryan exclusively.

Why it's the BFD: The startup helps institutional and private lenders originate, underwrite and monitor portfolios of complex credit products.

How it works: EnFi's platform uses AI to digitize labor-intensive, manual processes for private and institutional lenders.

On the underwriting side, it aggregates and analyzes borrower data, verifies its accuracy and converts it into actionable information.

The platform also enables lenders to continually monitor their portfolios on an aggregate and per-loan basis and receive real-time alerts when issues arise.   

The big picture: The private credit market is booming, topping $2.1 trillion globally last year, according to the IMF.

However, the migration from banks and public markets to private credit lenders creates potential risks due to a lack of transparency and difficulty in monitoring complex credit portfolios.

"Institutional bank lenders, as well as private credit and specialty lenders, suffer from a pervasive set of blind spots when it comes to the risk that impacts their portfolios," CEO Joshua Summers says.

Between the lines: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 27,000 open financial analyst roles in the U.S. every year. 

But Summers argues lenders "can't hire enough credit analysts or risk analysts to sit at desks and monitor your entire portfolio every single day."

He adds that most risk analysts spend 80% to 90% of their time not actually assessing risk but dealing with "administrative nightmares."

"We realized there was an opportunity to supercharge every risk analyst out there and give them their time back so they can think about risk," Summers says.

Behind the scenes: Before founding EnFi, Summers and CTO Scott Weller were serial entrepreneurs and investors in the Boston tech scene.

Summers was an executive at ad tech firm Where.com, acquired by eBay in 2011, and he founded Clypd, bought by AT&T in 2019.

Weller most recently founded SessionM, a customer engagement and loyalty marketing startup acquired by Mastercard in 2019. 

Zoom in: Unusual Ventures led the seed round, which included investment from Boston Seed, Argon Ventures and Impellent Ventures.

Credit risk analysis startup EnFi raises $7.5M

Illustration of a man tightrope walking on an upward trending line. 

💳 Brex abandons co-CEO model (TechCrunch)

Pedro Franceschi will become the sole CEO of the corporate card and expense management startup, while Henrique Dubugras will become board chairman.

🐜 Ant Group spent $2.9B on research last year (Bloomberg)

Alibaba's affiliate has been boosting its R&D investment over the past three years, including a record 21.2 billion yuan (~$2.9 billion) on research in 2023. One notable investment is in its large language model BaiLing, which won approval from the Chinese government last year.

🏦 Terraform Labs agrees to pay $4.5B penalty to SEC (WSJ)

Do Kwon's company yesterday agreed to one of the largest-ever penalties to settle a civil securities fraud lawsuit. Kwon himself agreed to pay $204 million as part of the deal.

🌚 MoonPay and PayPal integration expands to EU and U.K. (The Block) 

Clients in the United Kingdom and European Union can now buy crypto on MoonPay using PayPal. The announcement follows a similar launch in the U.S. last month.

Credit score

Illustration of an exam answer sheet with the words "credit score" hand written in red ink.

Go deeper into our full database with the Axios Pro Deals Tracker.

• AccountsIQ, a Dublin accounting technology startup, raised a €60m Series C from growth investment fund Axiom Equity. axios.link/3KEnnMi

• Layer3, a token distribution protocol, raised a $15m Series A led by ParaFi and Greenfield Capital. Electric Capital, Immutable, Lattice, Tioga, LeadBlock and Amber also participated. axios.link/3KCAE8h

• Sahl, an Egyptian startup, raised $6m in Series A funding led by Ayady for Investment and Development. axios.link/3VoQckM

• Sidekick, a British wealth and savings app for millennials, raised a £4.5m seed led by Pact VC and TheVentureCity. MS&AD, Blackwood and 1818 also participated. axios.link/3KIZzak

• Kima, a settlement protocol connecting TradFi services to DeFi tools, raised a $5m pre-seed round led by Blockchange and FinSec Innovation Lab. Outlier Ventures, Blockchange, Big Brain Holdings, Castrum Capital, Kangaroo Capital and Maven Capital also participated. axios.link/4b344qN

• Irys, an on-chain data developer, raised $3.5m led by Lemniscap, with participation from Framework, Primitive Ventures, Hypersphere, Permanent Ventures and EV3. axios.link/3KGAMU4

• BayaniPay, a Philippines money transfer company, raised $3m in a Series A extension. Wavemaker Partners, PTGB and Talino Venture Studios led. axios.link/3VCCSdU

• Danelfin, a Barcelona-based stock selection and portfolio management AI company, raised €2m led by Nauta Capital. axios.link/3RsLgu5

• Pluxee (Paris: PLX) agreed to buy Cobee, a Madrid-based employee benefits app that had raised over $70m from Balderton Capital, Octopus Ventures, Notion Capital, Speedinvest and Dila Capital. axios.link/3z8ftbq

• 360 One WAM, an Indian wealth manager, bought Indian mutual fund investment app ET Money for around $44m. axios.link/3yZUyr6

Deals!

• Simon Thorn (ex-Barclays) and Neil Barrable (ex-HSBC) joined First Abu Dhabi Bank as chief compliance officer and chief credit officer, respectively. axios.link/4ef6iGt

• Peter Kleinschmidt, formerly a partner at PwC, was appointed to the supervisory board of N26 AG. axios.link/4c2Seyb

• Matteo Dante Perruccio, previously CEO of Pioneer Investment Management SgR, was appointed chairman of VGX Foundation. axios.link/3XiFejl

• Paxos has cut about 20% of its workforce, or 65 people, according to an internal email. axios.link/3z0RbQM

It's personnel

🎅🏻 @Ryan is thinking about growing his beard out for summer.

♣️ @Lucinda enjoyed learning poker last night.

Thanks to George Moriarty and Rob Reinalda for today's edits.

And thanks to you for reading this edition of Fintech Deals. Please tell your fintech friends about this newsletter. They can sign up here.

June 13, 2024

1 big thing: Renter screening platform Findigs raises $27M