Mirador Financial today announced a $2 million seed funding round for accelerating R&D and expanding its sales organization to meet demand for its next-generation small business lending platform and data services. Investors include Collaborative Fund, Crosslink Capital, Vesta Corporation, Wicklow Capital and angels Eric Bunting, Bruce Gibney, Robert Harteveldt, Awy Julianto, George Kenny, Bruce Weinstein and Bill Ullman.
While small businesses drive the U.S. economy by providing half of all jobs, SMBs need more than $600 billion in credit to fuel growth. However, lending to the sector has shrunk by a third despite many years of GDP expansion and urgent private-sector and government mandates to increase the flow of credit. Mirador has developed new technologies that allow banks to capitalize on this unmet need for capital. Using Mirador, banks can now quickly assess risk and offer attractive loan pricing to small businesses whose shorter operating histories previously made it impossible to obtain loans at compelling rates, if at all. Using new sources of data and machine learning, Mirador's platform facilitates faster, less-expensive credit to borrowers while minimizing credit losses. It can be used as is, or its flexible framework can be integrated seamlessly as a white-label solution that fits into any lender's infrastructure while conforming to industry compliance and security standards.
'Banks and credit unions are more motivated than ever to expand and adapt their lending practices to be able to serve more existing customers and acquire new ones,' said Craig Shapiro, founder and managing partner at Collaborative Fund. 'But to operate profitably in this fast-growing market, banks need better lending algorithms and loan monitoring data. This technology is difficult to develop in house, so it makes more sense to come from Mirador, a trusted, specialist third-party.'
'Given the scale of the SMB lending problem, only banks can provide the capital the market requires. As demonstrated by the mismatch of shrinking credit against a background of economic recovery, banks need new tools to find credit-worthy customers to lend to and to expand credit to existing customers,' said Bruce Gibney, angel investor in Mirador, and a backer of PayPal, SpaceX and Palantir. 'The growth of peer-to-peer lending underscores the demand for lending, but the half-trillion dollar scale of the business means that a comprehensive solution requires banks deploying new technologies to get credit flowing. Mirador and its customers understand that old technologies or small-scale approaches aren't enough.'
'Most lending institutions today are using the same consumer data sources and multiple week credit approval processes that they've used since the 1990s,' said Trevor Dryer, co-founder and CEO of Mirador. 'But entrepreneurs and business owners will no longer endure a slow process that likely results in a 'no.' Now there are hundreds of new possible data sources to use, and advanced analytics and machine learning principles that can be applied. It's causing a much-needed renaissance in small business lending, providing more liquidity to deserving entrepreneurs and reduced default risk for lenders.'
The Mirador Lending Platform is available today and is used by several lending institutions.
About Mirador Financial
Mirador Financial was founded in 2013 by Trevor Dryer, former head of Intuit Mobile Payments and machine learning scientist Dr. William Beaver, former VP of Technology, Client Solutions at Datek (TD Ameritrade). Mirador leverages data science to help banks, credit unions and lending nonprofits provide more and better credit to small businesses, while minimizing credit losses, and dramatically increasing the speed of transactions for all participants. The company's elegant software-as-a-service platform can be used as-is or customized for institutional lenders, drawing on dozens of industry and unconventional data feeds to help banks make dramatically more accurate underwriting decisions, find new customers and monitor loans after origination. Learn more about Mirador: www.miradorfin.com.