Today we announced that Greylock Partners led a $20M Series B investment round in PayJoy, with participation from our seed investor Core Innovation Capital and our Series A lead Union Square Ventures. As part of this investment, Josh McFarland will be joining our board. This brings our total financing in debt and equity to about $70M.
This round represents a significant milestone for us. When we raised our Series A, we were primarily a finance company approving 90% of underbanked applicants in the US and Mexico for device financing using our software. We are now primarily an enterprise software company enabling the underbanked to get a phone or get a loan in over a dozen countries and we’re continuing to grow globally. Many of our partners have increased their approval rates from 10% to 90% and reduced their default rates by 50% using our software.
To provide a sense of this shift, here are the public partners we are working with today:
The impact of our technology is hard to fathom, especially for people in developed markets who use credit like water. But if you look at the World Bank map of access to credit worldwide, you can see the delta between developed and emerging markets.
And beyond the data, we hear stories from partners about how our technology is changing lives, not only for the end consumers but for their staff and contractors as well. For example, with our partner d.Light, we have been able to offer smartphones to customers deep in rural Kenya using field reps on bikes. This is working so well that a couple of the reps selling these smartphones have been able to set up a dedicated store. Here they are waving at you through your screen from the Kenyan countryside.
We have grown so quickly — and had such an impact wherever we have grown — because credit is sorely needed virtually everywhere as the middle class expands. Credit requires assessing ability to pay and ensuring willingness to pay, yet the vast majority of the world’s population does not have a credit score and cannot pledge collateral. Enter the PayJoy Lock — now globally available — which converts smartphones into collateral, ensuring willingness to pay and reducing the burden on lenders to assess ability to pay.
We enable credit not only through our patented technology but also our partnerships, and with this round we plan to invest in both. We plan to continue to add compatibility partners like chip makers and OEMs to ensure we are relevant to more end users. We also plan to scale up our partnerships with lenders worldwide, specifically ones that have access to capital, underwriting, developers, and distribution. We look forward to engaging with players throughout emerging markets via our offices in Mexico City, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangalore, and Johannesburg.
We’re excited to continue unlocking access for the next billion and to share more about our partnerships and product innovations soon.
