Credit and Lending Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2025

February 2025

Browse 12 of the top Credit and Lending startups funded by Y Combinator. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, these are some of the hottest and fastest-growing startups.

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  • Legalist
    Legalist
    Y Combinator LogoS2016
    Active • 40 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Asset management firm that specializes in esoteric private credit assets in litigation and bankruptcy
    fintech
    legaltech
  • Finley
    Finley
    Y Combinator LogoW2021
    Active • 32 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Finley simplifies debt capital raise and management. Our software helps companies like Ramp, Arc and Parafin automate due diligence, ensure compliance, and streamline ongoing reporting with their capital providers. Our team brings experience from Goldman Sachs, Nova Credit, and Palantir Technologies, and is backed by Y Combinator and Bain Capital Ventures.
    fintech
    saas
    enterprise
  • Karat Financial
    Karat Financial
    Y Combinator LogoW2020
    Active • 40 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    We're building the one-stop shop for creator finances. Your favorite digital creators—the ones you follow every day on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Twitch—aren’t just extraordinarily talented personalities and community builders. They’re also businesses. That means they have business needs—managing revenues, expenses, savings, credit, banking. We’re building products that help creators spend less time worrying about finances so they can focus on creating.
    fintech
    entertainment
  • Sivo
    Sivo
    Y Combinator LogoW2021
    Active • 15 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Sivo provides debt as a service. Our API and risk protocol allows fintechs, neobanks, and gig platforms to lend money to their users, at scale, without having to raise debt which can take up to two years. You can think of us as Stripe for Debt. We started 6 months ago, in March signed a $100m debt capital partnership, and will be launching our API in April. We already have more than 100 companies in our customer pipeline including Uber.  We’ve been able to move so quickly because we are a team with previous exits and decades of experience in risk, debt, and enterprise software for companies including Goldman Sachs, Revolut, NASA, McKinsey and Citigroup.
    artificial-intelligence
    fintech
  • Nova Credit
    Nova Credit
    Y Combinator LogoS2016
    Active • 100 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Nova Credit is a consumer-permissioned credit bureau with two products that help businesses make more fair and informed decisions on millions of ‘thin file’, no credit history, or new-to-country applicants. The Credit Passport® unlocks cross-border credit bureau data to help businesses underwrite new-to-country newcomer populations. The Cash Atlas™ provides greater insight into the cash flows of any applicant, including verifying their income with greater precision than alternatives. Businesses use these products to approve more applicants without taking on more risk, and consumers are empowered to put their best foot forward in their applications. The company’s differentiated data sources and proprietary analytics are used by leading organizations like American Express, Verizon, HSBC, SoFi, and Yardi. Nova Credit is backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, and Canapi as well as executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citi. Learn more at www.novacredit.com or reach out to connect@novacredit.com.
    fintech
  • Lendtable
    Lendtable
    Y Combinator LogoS2020
    Active • 20 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    1 in 4 Americans do not get their full 401(k) match. That means 25 million workers are leaving $24 billion on the table in free employer contributions. The primary reason these workers cannot get their match is because they do not have enough to both cover living expenses and invest. Lendtable helps workers get thousands in additional income by giving them a cash advance to cover their living expenses so they can finally begin earning their employer match. Once their money has vested we take some of the match money earned in order to cover our expenses. Workers now have thousands of dollars more without putting any money down, and we make money helping them do so -- we win if they win.
    fintech
  • Grain
    Grain
    Y Combinator LogoW2020
    Active • 30 employees • Oakland, CA, USA
    Grain is a mobile app that transforms the debit card you already have into a credit card by linking it to a line of credit based on your cash flow. For the millennials, Gen Zs, and immigrants who are afraid of falling into crippling credit card debt, there is now a distinct market opportunity to offer an alternative to how these 100M people access and manage credit.
    fintech
  • Landed
    Landed
    Y Combinator LogoW2016
    Acquired • 2 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Landed helps employers develop programs that increase access to homeownership for their employees. We do this by unlocking the power of shared appreciation to create down payment programs tailored to the needs of each institution, improving recruitment and retention of key talent. Unlike other programs, shared appreciation is mutually beneficial to funders and buyers, creating a self-renewing pool of capital that recycles as homebuyers exit the program.
    fintech
    proptech
  • Stilt
    Stilt
    Y Combinator LogoW2016
    Acquired • 35 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Stilt/Onbo enables you to launch credit products without a bank sponsor. We have built APIs to abstract complexity around licenses, regulatory compliance, underwriting, loan management system, credit reporting, and debt capital. We are backed by fintech investors including Y Combinator, Link Ventures, Hillsven Capital, Petrushka investments (early backer of Lending Club, Zillow, Check, Pets.com), and CEOs of billion-dollar fintech companies.
    fintech
    saas
    b2b
    lending
  • Dharma Labs
    Dharma Labs
    Y Combinator LogoS2017
    Acquired • 14 employees • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Dharma is the only Ethereum wallet capable of seamlessly moving money between any US bank account and decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. The net result is a product that looks & feels like Coinbase on steroids — Download an App. Plug in your bank. Invest in the exponentially growing universe of tokens & yield opportunities in DeFi with a tap.
    fintech
    crypto-web3
  • Level
    Level
    Y Combinator LogoS2021
    Acquired0 • San Francisco, CA, USA
    Level provides fast and simple financing to lending startups that gets them off the ground and grows with them as they scale. We do so by buying loans in small quantities at first and rewarding our customers with more access to capital based on performance. Co-founder & CEO, Vladimir Korshin, previously worked in the traditional venture debt system at Silicon Valley Bank, where he noticed that strong startups were frequently denied from non-dilutive financing because they were too small. Just 4 weeks after going live with our first customer, we purchased $1.3M in loans across 6 customers. The founding team brings 30+ years of startup experience: Vladimir previously worked as an operator at Facebook, Eventbrite, and Niantic; Asa Schachar was an engineer at Microsoft and managed teams of engineers at Optimizely; Molly Hogan led new and international product initiatives at Amazon for over 7 years. Level is backed by Liquid2, Y Combinator (S21), and others. https://www.trylevel.app/
    fintech
    lending