Underwriting (UW) services are provided by some large financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and investment houses, whereby they guarantee payment in case of damage or financial loss and accept the financial risk for liability arising from such guarantee. An underwriting arrangement may be created in a number of situations including insurance, issues of security in a public offering, and bank lending, among others. The person or institution that agrees to sell a minimum number of securities of the company for commission is called the underwriter.
A home equity line of credit, or HELOC, is a revolving type of secured loan in which the lender agrees to lend a maximum amount within an agreed period, where the collateral is the borrower's property. Because a home often is a consumer's most valuable asset, many homeowners use their HELOC for major purchases or projects, such as home improvements, education, property investment or medical bills, and choose not to use them for day-to-day expenses.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden.
LendingClub is a financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was the first peer-to-peer lender to register its offerings as securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and to offer loan trading on a secondary market. At its height, LendingClub was the world's largest peer-to-peer lending platform. The company reported that $15.98 billion in loans had been originated through its platform up to December 31, 2015.
Zopa Ltd. is a British financial services company which offers deposit accounts, personal loans and credit cards. It began as the world's first peer-to-peer lending company in 2005 and gained a full banking licence in 2020. The peer-to-peer side of its business closed in December 2021.
Funding Circle is a commercial lender. Originally it was a peer-to-peer lending marketplace that allowed the public to lend money directly to small and medium-sized businesses. Through this exchange businesses access lower costs of financing than they would get at a bank and the public are able to become lenders and in doing so make a return on their capital. It closed its lending option to "retail investors" between 2020 and 2022, and then announced, in March 2022, that it had made the closure permanent.
BetterCloud, an independent software vendor based in New York, NY and with engineering offices in Atlanta, GA, builds unified SaaS management software. A venture-backed startup, BetterCloud has raised $187 million in total funding, with the most recent round was led by Warburg Pincus with series F funding with $75 million raised to date. A previous round of funding was done in April 2018 which was led by Bain Capital Ventures. In December 2016, BetterCloud completed pivot from G Suite to general SaaS management.
LendUp was an American online direct lender. It offered payday loans, installment loans, and credit cards to consumers with low credit scores using publicly available data to assess creditworthiness. The company referred to its customers as “the emerging middle class.” LendUp also issued credit cards in partnership with Tom Steyer's Beneficial State Bank.
SoFi Technologies, Inc. is an American online personal finance company and online bank. Based in San Francisco, SoFi provides financial products including student and auto loan refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, credit card, investing, and banking through both mobile app and desktop interfaces.
Earnest is a technology-enabled fintech lender headquartered in San Francisco, California that offers education financing products, including student loan refinancing and private student loans. The company evaluates a person’s full education, employment, and financial profile, in addition to their credit score in order to obtain a complete financial profile of each applicant. This type of credit is referred to as "merit-based lending."
Databricks, Inc. is an American enterprise software company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project to bring reliability to data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.
LendKey is a lending platform and online marketplace that allows consumers to apply for and receive private student loans, student loan refinancing and home improvement loans from their local credit unions and community banks. LendKey's cloud-based tools and infrastructure enable the nation's 13,000+ community financial institutions to enter online lending and offer loans for various asset classes.
Peerform is a peer-to-peer lending company based in New York City, which matches prime and near-prime qualified borrowers in the United States to accredited high net worth and institutional investors on its online platform. Its algorithm to determine loan eligibility focuses on a variety of factors including but not limited to FICO scores. In January 2011, Peerform raised $1.3 million during an angel funding round. In April 2014, Peerform raised $1.1 million in a seed funding round led by Corporest Development, a European investment firm.
Snowflake Inc. is a cloud computing–based data cloud company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode.
Instabase is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides an Applied AI platform that can be used to understand any content such as documents, files, databases, etc., and build workflows to automate business processes.
Dataiku is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning company which was founded in 2013. In December 2019, Dataiku announced that CapitalG—the late-stage growth venture capital fund financed by Alphabet Inc.—joined Dataiku as an investor and that it had achieved unicorn status. As of 2021, Dataiku is valued at $4.6 billion. Dataiku currently employs more than 1,000 people worldwide between offices in New York, Denver, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Munich, Frankfurt, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, and Dubai.
Funding Societies is a Southeast Asia’s digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), headquartered in Singapore. It was the first such platform in Singapore to engage an escrow agency to independently and safely manage investors’ funds. In Indonesia it is known as Modalku. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 5.1 million loan transactions.
Element AI was an artificial intelligence company based in Montreal, Quebec. It released studies on It was funded by the Government of Canada for CAD$5 million, and raised US$102 million independently, before being acquired by ServiceNow. Many employees were terminated, their stock options cancelled, and its business was abandoned by ServiceNow. Before being acquired, it had collaborated with Amnesty International, Twitter, Singapore Management University, the Port of Montreal, LG Electronics, and others to release several studies.
Moveworks is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company develops an AI platform, designed for large enterprises, that uses natural language understanding (NLU), probabilistic machine learning, and automation to resolve workplace requests.
Snyk is a Boston-based cybersecurity company specializing in cloud computing. It was founded in 2015 out of London and Tel Aviv with headquarters in Boston.
US$842 million (2022)
US$1.94 billion (2022)