This is a blog dedicated to building in public, where founders can see what goes on behind the scenes at a venture-backed startup. Weekly internal team emails (on a delay) are juxtaposed against interviews and articles published in real-time.

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Our path to $[ ]M+

March 21, 2022

We are being measured against our revenue for this year and our ability to hit the targets we’ve set for ourselves across our recurring revenue and our transaction revenue. On our path to $[ ]M+ in revenue, around half of that will come from our broker dealer’s transaction revenue, where we will be delivering on our promise of seeing our borrowers through their entire capital markets life, all the way through to when they hit the institutional markets.

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How to fund your fintech loan book with Nelson Chu

In this latest podcast, “How to Fund Your FinTech Loan Book with Nelson Chu”, Darren Franks chats with Nelson Chu, Founder and CEO at Percent.

Welcome back to Talking Success, one of the Best FinTech podcasts globally! Nelson provides valuable insights into the role of private credit in emerging markets and its potential to drive FinTech innovation and economic development. As technology continues to reshape the financial landscape, private credit investment offers new opportunities for businesses and investors to unlock growth and prosperity in emerging markets.

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The promise behind investing in private credit, with Percent CEO Nelson Chu

Lex chats with Nelson Chu, founder and CEO of Percent - the modern credit marketplace. Nelson kicks off the discussion by walking through his inspiration for building the private credit marketplace and the challenges of operating in the fintech industry. He explains that Percent aims to provide a better alternative investment platform for credit investors by offering shorter durations and lower minimum investments. Nelson also discusses the importance of infrastructure in the private credit market and the need for technology to streamline processes.

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Levers for growth

March 14, 2022

As we grow out from our identity as a Series A company, there is an ideological shift from just finding product market fit to understanding how to develop and adjust the growth levers of our business to reach scale.

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Team, vision, product.... and revenue

March 7, 2022

As you heard in the all-hands on Friday, we've had tremendously positive feedback from VCs about our team, our vision, and everything we've built so far. The only pushback we've gotten has been around revenues, even though we've been limited by what we can do as the only underwriter on the platform to date. The past few years have spent experimenting, finding product market fit, and validating our vision with underwriters, investors, and borrowers alike, getting us to where we are today and building a fantastic foundation for our vision. The next few years have to be about how we turn that vision into a reality.

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Data rules our world

February 28, 2022

We've had a lot of questions in the past around what the IP we acquired is and how it actually fits into our broader vision. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of our engineering team, we were able to do our first demo of the platform with a VC who also has a credit fund and they came away incredibly impressed. The technology has the ability to essentially provide real-time surveillance on underlying small business borrowers, breaking down their receivables, payables, inventory, machinery, etc., graphed out over time with the ability to flag any anomalies along the way.

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Ready for our next asset class

February 22, 2022

We always know how to move quickly around here, that's for sure! For something that was just an idea a few weeks back to a full fledged launch of a brand new product offering last week, the pace at which we ship is remarkable to see. As we had outlined in the last all-hands, our next asset class after fintech lender finance is going to be venture loans. Instead of providing financing to lenders who then use it to expand their loan portfolios, we are now financing individual venture-backed companies who can use our capital to grow and scale their business to reach their next round of financing.

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The evolution of a founder: The power of letting go

Starting a company as a non-technical founder means doing it all. Out of necessity, you’re covering everything from fundraising to management of the profit and loss, all things product from design to user experience, plus marketing and more—because at the early stages, it’s just you.

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An overview of our company from end to end

February 14, 2022

It's been a full court press on the Series B front these past two weeks as I've taken 25 first round meetings with various different VCs at all sizes and scales. The consistent theme has been how impressed they are at the breadth of what we've built. Supporting 5 technology platforms simultaneously (borrowers, underwriters, investors, admin, surveillance) is no small feat and we've been able to continue to ship and deliver on product enhancements across all of them on a consistent basis.

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Private credit’s time to shine with Nelson Chu

In this podcast episode, listeners are joined by Nelson Chu, the experienced serial entrepreneur and Founder/CEO of Percent, a modern credit marketplace. Nelson's journey began with his recognition of inefficiencies in private credit markets, sparking his mission to revolutionize the industry.

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All green lights for Anzen

February 7, 2022

I'm excited to share that Anzen is officially a go. Our binding letter of intent (LOI) has been signed and the board has signed off on our strategic partnership. To top it all off, Anzen also closed on their initial pre-seed round and are using our LOI to close on their seed round, which is looking like it will wrap up in the next week or so as well.

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A week for the record books

January 31, 2022

What a week. I can't remember the last time in our company's history that we ever had such a flurry of activity in such rapid succession. Just like we had predicted, the world couldn't hear enough about us this past week. It wasn't all about press releases, it was a culmination of every teams' efforts in getting these key objectives over the finish line.

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A new us

January 24, 2022

Our last two big objectives ahead of our Series B are going to be announced this week, putting an exclamation on what has been one of the most impressive months in our company's history. Both of these types of initiatives normally take up to 6 months or more to complete and we managed to pull them off in less than 3. This week you will see the press release go out about our acquisition of [ ] technology from MidCap Financial, the subsidiary of Apollo, and the release of our new brand identity across all our marketing channels (website, social, etc.).

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