Petal, a credit card company helping people build their credit, has raised $140m in its Series D funding round.
The investment was led by Tarsadia Investments, with commitments also coming from Valar Ventures, CUNA Mutual, Encore Bank, Volery Capital Partners, Gopher Asset Management, RiverPark Ventures, Afore Capital, Gaingels, as well as many others.
Petal was created to help people build credit through Visa credit cards.
Someone can qualify for a Petal card even if they have never used credit before. To do this, Petal analyses a potential customer’s banking history and assesses creditworthiness based on income, spending and savings.
It refers to its checks as CashScoring, as it measures cash flows and other economic fundamentals that are not typically used in a credit score.
Petal enjoyed a strong 2021, tripling its user base and quadrupling its monthly revenue. There are 300,000 approved Petal credit cards currently in circulation, with the company adding between 10,000 and 20,000 new members each month.
In line with the investment, the FinTech company announced it had hired Erin Allard to lead its newly formed B2B data intelligence business Prism Data as its general manager. Allard has previously worked at Bloom Credit, Green Dot and The Bancorp.
Tarsadia’s head of venture and growth investing Rishi Reddy said that the traditional credit system is broken, and consumers need modern and accessible solutions. This need is one of the reasons the firm invested into Petal, with the FinTech company hoping to improve financial inclusion through access to credit.
To date, the company has raised a total of $240m in funding and over $450m in debt financing. The company raised $126m in debt in February 2021, of which, $100m came from Silicon Valley Bank and $26.6m from Trinity Capital.
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