Finance
Here’s the 18-page deck a fintech helping companies like DoorDash and Mindbody lend to SMBs used to raise $60 million
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- 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 cofounded the startup.
- Parafin 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 that other small businesses sell their products through. Some of Parafin’s customers include DoorDash and Mindbody, a software provider to tens of thousands of fitness, health, and wellness businesses.
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The fintech enables platform partners to offer capital to the small businesses they work with. Parafin’s tech offering spans product, marketing, compliance, and IT support for partners to embed capital products. The startup also provides the capital, sourced via debt capital providers, and manages underwriting and risk.
“When we left Robinhood, I don’t think we knew we’d be starting Parafin as it is now,” Sahill Poddar, CEO of Parafin, told Insider. All the cofounders 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 our 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 up to $150 million from Jefferies and Atalaya Capital Management.
Poddar and his cofounders — Vineet Goel, Parafin’s chief product officer, and Ralph Furman, its president — came from small-business owning families.
Poddar, the former head of machine learning engineering at Robinhood for four years, grew up in his family’s garment business in Kolkata, India. And Goel, who was the head of risk and fraud engineering at the stock-trading app, came from a family who ran an electrical wiring operation, also in Kolkata. A former data scientist at Robinhood, Furman’s grandparents 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 jumpstart their own company, they were drawn back to their roots.
“Some of us grew up in small-business families and have experienced first-hand the impact capital injection has on growing such businesses,” Poddar said. “Having accumulated a ton of knowledge about the US financial system and regulation while at Robinhood, we wanted to use the learnings to serve other markets that are being ignored: small businesses.”
Now, Parafin will use its fresh funding to expand its product set. The company is developing business-charge cards that platforms can tailor for their small-business customers, slated to launch in the fourth quarter.
See the 18-page pitch deck Parafin used to raise its $60 million Series B.
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