After The Funding: Q&A With VIVA Finance's CEO Jack Markwalter

VIVA Finance, founded by brothers Hodges Markwalter and Jack Markwalter, announced this month it has raised $220 million in new funding to grow its affordable loan platform.

The debt financing round mostly came from lead investor San Francisco-based Community Investment Management.

The Markwalter siblings, both graduates of the private school Marist in Atlanta and the University of Notre Dame. They founded VIVA in 2019 and took part in Venture Atlanta in 2022. The platform provides loans and repayment options for up to $10,000 loans based on income, not the traditional credit history metric.

Following the funding round, Jack Markwalter, VIVA’s co-founder and CEO, answered questions from Hypepotamus about the latest funding round, VIVA’s platform, how technology can help reach overlooked consumers, and what’s next for FinTech.

Here is a look at our Q&A conversation:

Question: As you've expanded, who have you found to be your core audience/customer base?

Answer: We have found our core audience to be working Americans who may have damaged credit histories.

Question: Why was it important to raise more capital now? How was the fundraising process?

As we have grown VIVA, we have seen enormous unmet demand for our product. We hit profitability for the first time in FY 2024, proving the sustainability of our business model. This capital will allow us to double-down on what we have seen is working for our customers and scale to, hopefully, doing billions of dollars in loan originations to millions of customers in the coming years.

Question: Are you publicizing the names/firms that are backing you in this funding round?

The only firm that we are publicizing that backed us in this funding round is Community Investment Management who provided the majority of the $220mm in capital through a debt facility.

Question: Has your tech/tech stack changed at all with the rise of AI?

Yes, in late 2023, we switched over to an AI-driven underwriting model for customer approvals. This has allowed us to approve customers with an average FICO score of a ~580 (average score in the US is ~710), and the current version of our underwriting model takes into account over 500 factors with many of them being non-traditional credit factors.

We also utilize a modular application flow that changes based on where you work. Our product can now serve employees of over 100,000 employers. We utilized AI to help us build out the employer database that makes our modular application possible.

Question: How big is Viva's team now?

We are up to 67 people! We have plans to use some of this capital to hire another ~20 people this quarter in our engineering, finance, and operations departments.