Summer 2020

Heron

Underwriting automation for small business finance

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What they do

automates small-business loan and insurance underwriting

How close to us

2, near

Does underwriting work in software at scale; finance buyer but not our margin problem.

Wedges

  • No wedge fit written yet.
L1 Company brain (knows the organisation) 2, clear
L2 Agent team (runs agents, tools, approvals) 1, light
L3 Does and learns (finishes, checks, measures, updates the brain) 2, clear

Who buys

Firm size
mid-market
Buyer type
business
Role
lenders and insurers
UK
not known
Their own description (from YC)

Heron is on a mission to eliminate the underwriting tax on American businesses. When a consumer applies for credit, a spinning wheel can return an offer in seconds; when a business applies for a loan or insurance policy, humans still spend hours reading documents, verifying the business, detecting fraud, and deciding what to offer. Heron does that work in software: lenders, insurers, and credit brokers send applications in and get declines and offers out in minutes instead of days. We have underwritten roughly 1 in 8 US employer businesses in the past year. That scale allows us to go beyond what any individual could ever do: identify cross-customer signals across millions of businesses to build new data products, and ultimately become the data layer for private businesses in the US. Backed by Insight Partners and Y Combinator.

Full teardown

No full teardown yet. On the deep list.

Technical detail
Slug
heron
Lens hash
179096c479
Pass
screen
Stale
no