Noble empowers companies

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, and angels like Doron Somech, co-founder of Unit, and Ben Cirlin, one of the first investors in Plaid.

Why We Invested: Today, 9% of global unicorns were founded in Israel. Israel’s technology sector had a record year in 2021, with startups raising $25B in funding and 33 companies entering the unicorn club valued at over $1B. This gold rush has brought deep institutional interest from U.S. growth firms like Insight Partners and General Atlantic, who have demonstrated strong conviction through record funding. The founders, business fundamentals, and exit opportunities are completely unprecedented from historical levels and we believe there is a significant opportunity to support and scale the country’s next generation of companies as they evolve into large enterprises capable of expansion and disruption at the global level. 

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 to one’s 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.

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 from annual licenses towards usage-based billing and even more so to freemium. Removing payments can lower the barrier to entry and incentivize customers to start using new platforms they would not have tried otherwise. As a result, these freemium companies are looking for monetization through financial services like banking-as-a-service (see 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 verticalized product provides a strong value proposition for customers seeking credit infrastructure.

While embedded lending has become a very exciting trend within fintech, it remains a relatively newer market. 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.

Thank you to Yonatan Mandelbaum for introducing us to the opportunity.