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The $20 million Series B round follows a $7 million Series A exactly a year ago, and was led by new investor Balderton Capital with participation from existing partner Index Ventures. The capital will be used to expand Credit Benchmark’s data gathering efforts with global IRB banks, extend its intelligence platform and grow its international team and presence.
“The service does depend on the contributing banks and now we have critical mass there so we’ve been able to deliver our service outputs, so the commercial service launched just now this month,” she said. “The signing up of banks is going along well. I can’t reveal numbers unfortunately,” she added. Beyond its pitch that consensus credit data offers a more precise and up-to-date model for ratings, it also claims its approach allows it to offer risk assessment data on various entities that are not assessed by traditional credit risk sources, such as agency ratings and credit default swap prices. These additional entities include unrated sovereigns, hedge funds and unrated public and private companies. (A line on its website claims its model covers “a universe 90% unrated by traditional rating agencies”.)
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