Kabbage, an Atlanta-based global financial services, technology, and data platform, recently acquired Radius Intelligence for an undisclosed sum.
With the acquisition, Kabbage seeks to expand its technology platform around digital lending, which assists small and medium-sized businesses’ cash flow needs. The company, backed by SoftBank, completed its first data-focused acquisition in 2018 when it acquired Orchard to enhance its internal operations and provide data-driven insights to customers about its business.
Radius Intelligence is a marketing intelligence firm that had previously raised approximately $120 million from investors, including Founders Fund, David Sacks, Salesforce Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, and Jared Leto. Radius, which has always offered data integration, channel integration, and data management capabilities, entered the growing market of customer data platforms (CDPs) around this time last year with the launch of its Unify platform. CDPs eliminate data silos and provide a 360-degree view of a customers’ journey.
This acquisition ties into a theme of fintech companies expanding their platforms and partnering with companies to form strategic collaborations. For example, it was recently announced that U.S.-based financial markets technology services provider, Pico, acquired Corvil, a Dublin-based analytics firm. This acquisition, according to CEO and founder of Pico, Jarrod Yuster, "will deliver full transparency into their clients’ trading and IT operations while addressing the challenges that come with rapid expansion into new global markets." Additionally, it was announced late last year that ZestFinance was forming a partnership with Microsoft to accelerate enterprise adoption of machine learning in financial services. This collaboration aims to help lenders run powerful machine learning credit models with full transparency and compliance.
An issue for financial lending is the lack of customer data to evaluate the risk of a borrower, and for Kabbage, this acquisition will help determine the terms of a loan, as well as offer customers better insights into cash flow. This integrated, unified data will allow Kabbage to create a comprehensive picture of a customer, instead of just relying on a credit score.
