Fintech Parafin scored $60 million in Series B with this pitch deck
- Parafin is a fintech that helps other businesses offer financing to their third-party sellers.
- Robinhood’s former heads of ML and risk engineering, and a data scientist co-founded the startup.
- Kerosene used this 18-page pitch deck to raise a $60 million Series B.
A trio of former Robinhood employees are trying to help small businesses access capital via the marketplaces they work with.
Parafin, launched in 2020, works with so-called platform partners, or companies through which other small businesses sell their products. Some of Parafin’s clients include DoorDash and Mindbody, a software provider to tens of thousands of fitness, health and wellness businesses.
Fintech enables platform partners to offer capital to the small businesses they work with. Parafin’s technology offering spans product, marketing, compliance and IT support for partners to embed capital products. The startup also provides the capital, raised via debt capital providers, and manages underwriting and risk.
“When we left Robinhood, I don’t think we knew we were going to start Parafin as it is now,” Sahill Poddar, CEO of Parafin, told Insider. All the co-founders knew was that they wanted to build technology that would help small businesses. “It was in our conversations with business owners themselves – we did a lot of them in the early days to find the way – that the problem of lack of access to capital became clear,” he said.
On August 2, Parafin closed its $60 million Series B, led by GIC with participation from Thrive Capital and Ribbit Capital. The fintech, which is now valued at $520 million, also raised a debt facility of up to $150 million from Jefferies and Atalaya Capital Management.
Kerosene product on mobile phone
Kerosene
Poddar and his co-founders—Vineet Goel, Parafin’s chief product officer, and Ralph Furman, the president—came from family-owned small business backgrounds.
Poddar, formerly head of machine learning engineering at Robinhood for four years, grew up in his family’s apparel business in Kolkata, India. And Goel, who was the head of risk and fraud engineering at the stock trading app, came from a family that ran an electrical wiring business, also in Kolkata. Furman’s grandparents, a former data scientist at Robinhood, ran a convenience store in Poland.
And while their careers took them to top institutions — from Facebook to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University — when the time came to start their own company, they were drawn back to their roots.
“Some of us grew up in small business families and have experienced firsthand the impact capital infusion has on growing such businesses,” Poddar said. “Having gathered a ton of knowledge about the US financial system and regulation while at Robinhood, we wanted to apply those learnings to serve another market that is being ignored: small businesses.”
Now Parafin will use its new funding to expand the product set. The company is developing business payment cards that platforms can tailor for small business customers, to be launched in the fourth quarter.
