Credit underwriting company ZestFinance has secured $20 million in additional funding from the likes of Peter Thiel, bringing its total funding to $100 million.
ZetsFinance uses machine-learning to enrich its underwriting process. The ZestFinance process considers some 30,000 pieces of data when evaluating credit-worthiness, while traditional models count just 10 to 15. Dozens of models run simultaneously, yielding results within seconds.
Other funders in this Series C round led by Peter Thiel include Northgate Capital, Matrix Partners, Kensington Capital Holdings, Eastward Capital Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The company, founded by former Google CIO Douglas Merrill, began as a payday lender, but its sophisticated data models soon opened up other opportunities. The company is now in discussion with several banks to incorporate its models, which may open up new loan customers to the banks.
“Getting credit into the hands of more people is one of the financial service industry’s biggest hurdles,” Merrill said. “We’ve found that big data done right — machine learning, combined with human inference — can solve this problem.”
ZestFinance has increased net repayment by 90% over the standard credit scores, the company says, and has more than doubled the number of underbanked loan customers.
TechCrunch calls ZestFinance, ” an interesting acquisition target for any of [the banking] giants.” The company is already doing work for several of them.