Last week, we announced our $45 million Series B led by Insight Partners. Naturally, going through a fundraise is a great time to tell our story.

We went live in late 2019. With just a few people on the team at the time, we were able to fully, automatically decision and process loans, end to end. Even better, employees at the first business who started offering us wrote things like: 

“We are loving working with Wisetack. It is so easy to use. Even our most helpless tech has used it successfully more than once!”  

Besides being good for a chuckle, that was just about the best thing we could have heard as it captured the essence of what we wanted to do. We set out to build lending technology that people love, and that makes it simple, easy, and affordable for anyone to pay over time for a large purchase. We wanted to make it incredibly easy to use, not only for consumers, but also for small businesses who don’t have the time and resources to deal with complexity.

To our investors, we build “embedded fintech”: our APIs integrate Buy Now Pay Later products into any software and user experience. However, that doesn't mean much to the electricians, plumbers and car repair shops who use us to offer “pay over time” options to their customers. To these businesses, we simply integrate with the software tools they already use (for example, Housecall Pro and Jobber, each serving tens of thousands of home services businesses). Through our integrations, we bring ease and simplicity for both businesses and consumers.

For those not intimately familiar with lending technology, making things easy takes a lot of work behind the scenes. We didn’t take it for granted that everything would work well from the start, and it was very exciting when our initial customers in 2019 validated that we were providing something useful.

2020 was all about building the foundation of the business. We added to the team, but carefully, brought on more merchants and processed more loans, and watched the risk numbers closely, not knowing how COVID shutdowns might impact our business. We talked to a lot of customers to get their feedback, and iterated on the product based on their needs. We worked with software partners to deepen their integrations with Wisetack, each partner creating their own experiences on top of our technology.

Towards the end of the year, we implemented NPS surveys for merchants and borrowers. The positive feedback that comes in from them has been really energizing - and sometimes entertaining - for our team, and the suggestions for improvement are the most valuable product input we get. Today, our NPS is a lofty 77, and we’re proud of the fact that over 80% of customers rate us a 9 or 10.  It’s one of the most important metrics we watch.

With the strong foundation set last year, 2021 was about doubling down on what worked: more partners, more features, and more team members to support our growth. We set an ambitious goal to 10x the business this year and I’m excited that ¾ into the year we are ahead of that goal.

When it came time to raise the Series B, I was confident in our product, our team, our story, and our trajectory. Rebecca Liu-Doyle of Insight Partners stood out in that she immediately understood not just what we were doing, but also where we were going.

The opportunity ahead of us is enormous and with this infusion of capital, we’ll be able to pursue it more quickly. I feel a tremendous sense of urgency around our mission of developing financial products that empower people, and I’m more energized than ever to fulfill this mission.

To do this, we’ll need more people on our team. Please check out https://www.wisetack.com/careers to see what we’re hiring for currently, or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest from Wisetack.

A sincere thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey so far. We’re just getting started, and I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.