Fishtail Raises $4.5 Million Seed Round Funding for Data-Driven Trade Finance Technology

Fishtail announced it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding, led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from leading data, fintech, and supply chain investors Rackhouse Ventures, Amara Ventures, and project44 CEO Jett McCandless and Chief Growth Officer, Jason Duboe.

“Trade finance has been an underinvested asset class for far too long,” says Fishtail CEO, Marc Held. “Fishtail’s novel trade technology unlocks top-line growth opportunities for both suppliers and freight forwarders.”

Complexity behind global supply chains has made it incredibly challenging   for financial institutions to fund purchase orders and invoices, internationally, for SMBs on a meaningful scale.

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Unsurprisingly, this is a major driver behind the 1.7 trillion USD per year trade finance gap, which is being increasingly widened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the supply chain disruptions caused by it.

Today, Fishtail’s data-driven, scalable solution allows for freight forwarders to provide financing to their customers within minutes – either by arranging extended payment terms through the financing of freight, or by financing the goods themselves that these logistics companies are transporting.

“All across the world in both developed and developing countries, SMBs are heavily underserved and neglected by large financial institutions,” adds Ryan McKillen – Uber employee #3, recovering CPA, and Partner at Thursday Ventures – “Fishtail is primed to provide flexible capital to the businesses that need it most.”

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Incorporating cutting-edge machine learning research, Fishtail’s trade finance automation platform turns global supply chain complexities from weakness into strength, extracting meaningful risk signals from the noise in messy supply chain and financial data.

“It’s shocking how little data is used by banks to finance businesses — we saw this first hand when we’re building out credit models to fund consumers and small businesses in emerging markets at Tala — which makes it clear as to why SMBs can’t get the trade finance they need to grow,” says founding investor, Kevin Novak (Uber’s first Head of Data Science, former Chief Data Officer for alternative underwriting lender Tala Financial, and founder of Rackhouse Ventures).

“In the short amount of time we’ve been operating, we’ve already accomplished some amazing things, financing goods and freight around the world for the traditionally ‘un-financeable’, which is fitting, given that trade is truly global and scale-agnostic,” Held says. “We’ve gathered the industry’s strongest cross-functional experts in data science, supply chain, and trade finance to seamlessly automate access to capital for ‘the 99%’. I couldn’t be more excited for what comes next.”

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