Imagine running a retail business without knowing how much you're paying your wholesaler for goods. Or running a restaurant without looking at the price of your ingredients. Or constructing homes without looking at the price of raw materials… you get the idea.
That lack of transparency would be frightening, but hey, things could still work out, right?
Well, let's up the stakes.
Imagine that, on top of not knowing exactly how much you were paying for your *inputs*, you also didn't know if you would have consistent and continued *access* to your wholesaler, your food supplier, or your building materials. That would almost certainly induce high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, and mild insomnia.
In the world of private credit (this is basically business credit for *all* companies that aren't publicly traded behemoths or small businesses), it's not only normal but *expected* that getting and maintaining access to debt capital (one of the key inputs for running any business!) will be opaque, error-prone, and hard to operationalize. In other words, supply chain uncertainty is the dismal reality in middle-market finance.
Private credit is enormous (add up all the VC dollars spent last year and you'd still be short of the amount of private credit issued over the same period), unavoidable, and broken.
That means credit access–the fuel or primary *financial input* for most medium-sized businesses–is hard to price, access, report on, and predict.
And yet it doesn't have to be that way; the data and operational issues of private credit have been solved in other domains (e.g., CRMs for Sales, infrastructure tooling for devs, EMRs for hospitals). What's missing is a software layer for business finance.
Finley has built the system of record for private credit. We plug into all borrower source systems and automate reporting and analysis for private credit lenders. The result is full transparency into the *cost* and *availability* of capital.
We're a team of builders, designers, finance experts, engineers, and systems thinkers from top companies in finance and technology, and we're backed by leading investors like Y Combinator and Bain Capital Ventures.
We're two years into our journey and our software helps companies manage over $3 billion in private credit, but it's still Day 1.
The challenges we're taking on will reshape the economy over the next decade, and we'd love to partner with team members who share our passion for innovation and company-building.
To learn more, check out our Careers page here: https://www.finleycms.com/careers/
