Kreditech, a Hamburg-based startup which was founded earlier this year, today announced a new funding round with Blumberg Capital, the management of a German investment bank and Point Nine Capital (Update – March 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
Several angel investors (including Michael Brehm, Heiko Hubertz, Felix Haas, Stefan Glaenzer), alongside Greycorp, Point Nine Capital, Digital Pioneers N.V., H2 Investments and YoungBrains invested in Kreditech earlier in 2012. In total Kreditech has now raised $4 million, which, according to CEO Sebastian Diemer, will be sufficient to scale the B2C business to break even in Q1 2013. In addition, Kreditech is planning the international launch of its B2B “Scoring as a Service” product across Europe in 2014.
Kreditech is a real-time scoring technology provider that applies big data analysis to thousands of data points in credit applications over individuals. Location data (GPS, micro-geographical), social graph (likes, friends, locations, posts), behavioural analytics (movement and duration on the webpage), people’s e-commerce shopping behaviour and device data (apps installed, operating systems) are just some examples of up to 8,000 data points that are processed in real-time for any single scoring unit. This technology is applied in two ways; firstly, in B2C markets for issuing online, SMS and Facebook microloans (e.g. www.kredito24.pl and www.kredito24.es) in real-time. Secondly, it is used for a global ‘Scoring as a Service’ database that provides scoring data without technical integration or contractual obligations to third parties (e.g. banks, leasing companies, e-commerce stores).
Kreditech operates offices in Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona and Kharkov and employs 13 professionals from 8 nationalities. So far, the startup has processed more than 100,000 applications with its platform Kredito24.pl in Poland alone, out of which between 10% and 20% have been accepted at various stages of the model development. For granted applications, Kreditech guarantees that the money is with the customer in less than 15 minutes, although it usually arrives in around 2 to 3 minutes. This is possible thanks to in-house developed systems that score and pay out in a fundamentally innovative way at no variable costs.
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