- Spinwheel, a platform that lets companies embed consumer debt solutions in their applications, announced recently it raised $11 million. These are the details.
Spinwheel — a platform that lets companies embed consumer debt solutions in their applications — announced that they have disclosed fundraising of $11 million led by QED Investors with participation from Core Innovation Capital, Fika Ventures, and Firebolt Ventures.
Spinwheel is known as a modern loan infrastructure startup that helps Americans get out of debt sooner by making it possible to embed the application, payment and management of loans into the apps people use the most. And by increasing access, choice, and transparency, Spinwheel aims to improve outcomes and shorten the debt lifecycle for all borrowers and their loved ones. Plus the company has already partnered with a number of leading brands, and plans to use its funding to accelerate sales, marketing and new product development that will expand its offering.
Student debt is known as being the first significant debt people hold in their lifetimes. And the student debt crisis has reached record highs in 2021. Today 45 million borrowers collectively owe $1.71 trillion. And for the nearly 70% of graduates entering the workforce with student debt each year, holding this debt is a significant source of stress—as is actually paying it down.
With student loan debt now being the second-highest consumer debt category—second only to mortgage debt—there has never been a more important time to remove the technological barriers preventing employers, businesses, and other institutions from supporting them with easy-to-use tools and solutions.
Spinwheel — which is based in Oakland — was founded by Campos and Tushar Vaish in 2019. And after first launching an MVP consumer app, they realized just how constrained debt solutions were by a lack of progress at the infrastructure layer. They shifted their focus to APIs to create opportunities for hundreds and thousands of businesses to innovate and solve problems.
After partnering with loyalty, payment, benefits, lending and banking businesses, Spinwheel’s APIs serve as the infrastructure that powers their partners’ lending, student debt management, and other real-world financial situations. And Spinwheel’s drop-in, customizable modules can be implemented in under one hour, allowing businesses to almost immediately begin addressing their users’ needs more quickly and effectively. Many businesses found that implementing Spinwheel’s holistic financial solution has saved them 4X the cost over building, implementing, and maintaining their own homegrown solutions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Student debt is a huge source of strain in this country, and we believe that applying technology to democratize intelligent debt solutions can help alleviate this burden and change the trajectory of peoples’ lives. A number of employers, financial institutions and others are starting to see this too, and are increasingly motivated to offer holistic financial solutions that include student debt. We want to make it as easy as possible for apps and services to support people in getting out of debt, so we’ve built the core infrastructure developers need to embed student loan solutions. Together, we can empower borrowers to understand, plan, monitor, optimize, pay, refinance and actually get out of debt.”
— Co-founder Tomas Campos
“Spinwheel is creating a holistic toolkit of native APIs that will ultimately allow hundreds and thousands of businesses to innovate and solve problems for the millions of people in the US looking to pay down their loans. It’s a rare win-win for the entire ecosystem as borrowers also benefit when Spinwheel unlocks their ability to easily launch new student loan features.”
— Frank Rotman, co-founder at QED
