US-based FinTech Altro, which aims to help people build credit, has raised $18m in a Series A funding round led by Pendulum Holdings.
According to a report from TechCrunch, the round also saw participation from Marcy Venture Partners, Citi Ventures, Black Capital Fund and Concrete Rose Capital, venture capital firm West and individual investors such as Dick Parsons Deborah Quazzo, among others.
Altro, which started out as Perch Credit, was founded in 2019 by Michael Broughton and Ayush Jain. The duo shared the belief that credit access should be free. They came up with the idea of helping people build credit through recurring payment forms such as digital subscriptions to Netflix or Spotify.
Participating services include but are not limited to YouTube Premium, Dollar Shave Club, Adobe Creative Cloud, Nintendo Online, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Xbox Live, Amazon Prime, HBO Max and DisneyPlus.
In the FinTech early days of 2020, the company was attending various pitch competitions, raising about $100,000, until an analyst for musician Jay-Z Marcy Ventures happened to be in the audience. The day after, the firm wrote a $250,000 check into the company, kicking off its seed round and prompting Broughton to drop out of college to focus on growing Altro.
Now, Altro plans to use its new capital to continue growing its credit and financial literacy programme as well as grow its team. For example, Altro is focused on educating users through a catalog of over 350 educational audio clips covering topics like cryptocurrency, investing and trading. Watching the snippets, the company says, not only allows users to become more financially savvy, but also positively impact users scores the more they engage.
The company also plans to soon allow people to build credit through making rent payments on time.
Rish Sinha, Pendulum managing director, said, ?There are 45 million underbanked Americans in the United States, many of whom are people of colour. The lack of access to credit is fundamentally preventing them from bettering their families livelihoods. Platforms like Altro can foster change that will improve peoples lives and also help this country achieve greater economic potential.p>
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