Last month Oliver and Marc Samwer — founders of the Rocket Internet startup incubator — launched Global Founders Capital, a new €150 million ($194 million) fund aimed at any and all startups worldwide. This month one of the first startups to benefit from that will be credit scoring startup Kreditech which has raised an undisclosed amount said to be “low to mid 7 digits”. We’ve heard USD$3.5 / EUR€3 million. This is in addition to the $4M is raised at the end of last year. Kreditech is live in the Czech Republic, Spain and Poland but, according to co-founder Felix Haas, will also soon launch in Russia, Mexico, Australia, Argentinia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan with its Kredito24 brand, which is not at all dissimilar to the UK’s Wonga.
Existing investors including Munich-based Global Founders Capital, Silicon Valley-based Blumberg Capital, Berlin-based Point Nine Capital and Hamburg-based H2 Investments also participated.
Sebastian Diemer, CEO and co-founder of Kreditech and Oliver Schimek, CFO of Kreditech said in a statement they had turned down lots of offers as they are currently “profitable” but the investors bring “strategic value” and add working capital.
The company has a technology which means they don’t require any external credit bureau data in their risk model, because they do identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources such as social networks. That means they can move fast into emerging markets, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, CTO and co-founder of Kreditech. Also involved is Heiko Hubertz, Nils Henning and Amiando founder Haas.
The technology is applied in B2C for issuing online, SMS and facebook microloans in real-time and plans a global “Scoring as a Service” database that provides scoring data without technical integration or contracts to third parties.
Kreditech operates offices in Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona, Moscow, Prague and Kharkov and employes 25 people.