Our Investment in Noble

Company Overview: Noble is a financial technology startup that empowers any company to quickly build, launch and scale credit products through an intuitive no-code credit decisioning engine powered by its credit underwriting API infrastructure.

Round: We participated in the Series A round led by Insight Partners with participation from TLV Partners, Operator Partners, Verissimo Ventures, George Kaiser Family Foundation, and Doron Somech, co-founder of Unit.

Our Thesis on Embedded Credit:

Tomorrow’s financial services are expected to be interconnected and often invisible; embedded in the consumer and business apps that we already use. While the last decade of fintech infrastructure was highly focused on embedding payments (think Stripe and Square), the upcoming decade will be focused on embedding credit products. Today’s fintech companies are becoming increasingly focused on embedding credit products within their platforms, and with good reason. Aside from credit products historically being the most lucrative, embedded credit products allow non-’traditional finance’ companies to position themselves as service providers with an array of financial products to suit their customer requirements. 

The thesis for offering access to capital directly to customers is relatively straightforward: leverage a direct relationship, proprietary data, and oftentimes access to cash flows to proactively underwrite customers. Not only does this engender customer loyalty, but the access to capital also enables customers to spend more and transact more often. Given that the speed, simplicity and convenience of an embedded credit product cannot be matched by a bank or third party lender, embedded lending is becoming an increasingly compelling option for companies and consumers alike.

However, credit means risk, and managing risk (and fraud) is essential to launching a fintech offering profitably. Companies that launch credit products are required to underwrite, which can be challenging as creditworthiness assessment isn't one-size-fits-all. As such, start-up and fintech companies often do not know where to start when it comes to building a credit policy. Integrating and negotiating contracts with necessary data providers is complicated, requiring a lot of time and expensive engineering resources. Accordingly, effective embedded lending requires a lending partner who can not only build the lending infrastructure, but can also help companies analyze important customer financial data.

Enter Noble:

Noble enables embedded lending by offering customers an intuitive, no-code credit underwriting infrastructure, empowering any company to quickly build, launch and scale credit products. 

Via APIs, Noble provides users with the white-label building blocks required for users to build their own personalized credit-underwriting infrastructure, no matter how easy or complex the use-case. Noble combines their intuitive front-end with a powerful and integrated back-end. Noble is directly integrated with the leading credit-risk data sources, enabling users to automate creditworthiness assessments, and continuously monitor existing customer behavior, all in one place.

Software companies are increasingly shifting towards usage-based billing and freemium. Removing payments can lower the barrier to entry and incentivize customers to start using new platforms they would not have tried otherwise due to cost. As a result, these companies are looking for monetization through financial services like banking-as-a-service (i.e. Unit). Historically, one of the largest revenue drivers for banks is credit products, which is a whole new set of skills for software companies. Noble's core customer profile today is fintechs and marketplaces looking for immediately accessible credit products that will become significant revenue drivers. Financing-in-a-box solutions today do not permit these companies to own or monitor credit risk, which is where the majority of economics accrue towards. This is why we believe Noble's vertically integrated product provides a strong value proposition for customers seeking credit infrastructure.

We are in the early innings of the next generation of enabling credit infrastructure and we believe Noble is at the forefront in the evolution of the next phase of fintech infrastructure. We are excited and privileged to work with an amazing team to do so. Noble has built a strong and highly technical team to date, mostly spread across engineering, product, design, data and credit-risk management. Noble’s co-founders, Tomer Biger (CEO) and Moran Mishan (CTO), worked together at WeWork for two years before co-founding Noble. Tomer has worked with Noble’s senior leadership for several years – Ziv Shabat, VP of Analytics, and Avishai Steiner, VP of Product, are former colleagues of Tomer from Behalf. Ari Corman, VP of Business Development, is Noble’s latest addition. Ari and Avishai previously worked together at Freightos, one of Noble’s first customers.