Credit Benchmark, a London, UK-based financial tech startup, closed a $7m Series A funding.
The round was led by Index Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to to expand their presence in the US, opening an office in New York later this year, increase its headcount with 30 new employees, with the majority of new positions focusing on data quality and data science, on its salesforce.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs Mark Faulkner and Donal Smith and and led by CEO Elly Hardwick, Credit Benchmark has launched a commercial service that gathers credit risk information from global banks and calculates consensus credit risk data analytics for institutional obligors, including sovereigns, banks, corporates and non-bank financials. The company currently produces estimates for probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD), which are useful for risk management and the financial markets more broadly.
A dozen global banks in the US, UK and Continental Europe have already committed to contribute their data, with more set to follow.
It expects to offer comprehensive coverage of the entities that matter most to financial institutions, including those such as funds, emerging market corporates and SMEs where there is currently little or no data from existing sources such as ratings agencies and credit default prices.
FinSMEs
09/07/2014