Alchemy, a lending as a service (LaaS) platform, is looking to raise $25 million to continue its recent growth surge – and it is actively seeking investors.
The company was co-founded by CEO Timothy Li who’s resume includes advising big lenders like Rocket Mortgage, working at JPM, and many other financial services firms. A longtime Fintech veteran, Li is also an occasional contributor to CI. We recently learned about Li looking to raise growth capital so we reached out to him for a comment.
Li told CI: “Alchemy has experienced 200% YOY growth with 40+ clients worldwide. Our 70+ global engineering talent is working 24/7 to improve the adoption of embedded finance software to all small businesses worldwide. We are talking to Fintech VCs to fuel our expansion and we are looking close our raise in the next 60 days “
As Fintech everywhere is quickly becoming the norm, Alchemy’s embedded services can enable old finance, new finance, and other transactional verticals to quickly fire up a lending service – like buy now, pay later (BNPL).
Earlier this month, CI reported that Alchemy is now global with clients in Canada, the US, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Australia.
In an interview last fall, Li explained the popularity of BNPL:
“BNPL is the newest credit rail without all the baggage of VISA and MasterCard. There’s no POS [point of sale] hardware, no expensive merchant fees, no compounding interests and issuing or acquiring banks getting involved. Any financing company can start a BNPL product. Some of these BNPL startups don’t need lending capital, the merchants/ retailers are taking on all the risk. BNPL is definitely taking over because it benefits the consumer (no interest) and the merchants (no expensive fees, hardware, conservative bank underwriting, chargebacks).”
He also explained how a firm could use Alchemy’s service as a white-label offering without needing to partner with a 3rd party like Affirm (and you can control all of your data).
While still relatively small, Alchemy is growing rapidly. Topline revenue is expected to almost triple in 2022 from last year. In 2021, Alchemy reported a profit – pretty unique for an early-stage Fintech. As there are millions of SMEs that can benefit from embedded finance, the market is there – Alchemy is now looking to fuel rapid expansion with a Reg D offering and the backing of VCs and accredited investors.
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