USA – TomoCredit, a San Francisco, CA-based fintech startup offering a credit card designed to build credit history for first-time borrowers, raised $7m in seed funding.
Backers included KB Investment Inc., a subsidiary of South Korea’s leading consumer bank, Kookmin Bank, Barclays, Knollwood Investment Advisory, BAM Ventures, Passport Capital, Ulu Ventures, and Strong Ventures and angel investors Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital, Michael Vaughan, former COO of Venmo, and James Kim, former head of finance at Tinder. The company intends to use the capital to further accelerate its growth through hiring (mainly full stack and data engineers) and product development (adding more interactive features to help consumers track and grow their credit.) Co-founded by Kristy Kim (CEO), a South Korean immigrant and Dmitry Kashlev (CTO), a Russian immigrant, TomoCredit provides credit to individuals that lack a credit score, most commonly young adults or internationals. Consumers early in their credit history can use TomoCredit to help boost credit scores and position themselves well as qualified candidates for mortgages, auto loans and lower insurance rates.The credit card – issued by Community Federal Savings Bank, member FDIC – operates with a debit card model: payments are made on a 7-day automatic payment schedule and no fees or APR are applied. Applications are screened based on real-time cash flow, not FICO or credit scores. Credit limits on average are $3,000, but can scale to a maximum of $10,000. Borrowers can link to their investment accounts to increase their credit limits.10/02/2021
