9fin: Decoding the $145 Trillion Debt Market

9fin proves that even the largest and most opaque markets can hide enormous opportunities for a founder who can turn a daily frustration into software infrastructure.

Founded in 2016 by Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh, 9fin was born from a precise observation experienced firsthand in the corridors of J.P. Morgan and Babson Capital: the debt market — roughly $145 trillion in debt capital markets — is the largest asset class in the world. Yet high-value decisions at banks, funds and advisors are still being made by reading PDFs, opening data rooms, interpreting covenants in Excel spreadsheets, and cross-referencing information scattered across emails and legal documents.

The problem is not a lack of information. It's that the information is dispersed, slow and hard to interpret. 9fin builds the solution: an AI-native platform that combines proprietary data, real-time news, analytics, document extraction and intelligent workflows in a single environment.

The first major strategic choice is verticality. Instead of building a generic financial search engine, 9fin digs deep into a precise segment: leveraged finance and high-yield bonds. And the deeper it digs, the larger the market reveals itself to be — coverage eventually expands into distressed debt, private credit, CLOs, asset-based finance and investment grade, with presence in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

The technology is not just automation — it is trust. 9fin insists on a hybrid model where AI and analysts, journalists and legal experts work together to ensure that outputs are reliable. In debt markets, a mistake is not a minor bug: it can change a financial decision worth hundreds of millions.

In 2022 came the Series A+ of $23 million. In 2024 the Series B of $50 million led by Highland Europe, with 400% ARR growth since the previous round and around 240 employees. In 2025, the acquisition of Bond Radar brought in 20 years of historical data on primary debt markets and expanded coverage across investment grade, asset-based finance, Asia and Latin America — deepening the competitive moat 9fin has built one dataset at a time.

On March 31, 2026, the Series C of $170 million led by HarbourVest, with participation from CPP Investments and historical backers, valued 9fin at $1.3 billion. Unicorn. More than 300 institutional clients, over 350 people on the team, and more than $250 million raised in total.

The lesson for founders is clear: "boring" markets — technical, opaque, unglamorous — can generate the most resilient startups, precisely because they have been overlooked for too long and because the customer's pain is real, expensive and urgent. When you solve that kind of problem, the customer does not buy you out of curiosity. They buy you because they can no longer do without you.

• The best B2B ideas often come from operational frustrations experienced firsthand, not from market analysis.
• A technical niche can hide a massive market: what matters is how expensive the problem is, not how glamorous the sector looks.
• In vertical AI, the competitive advantage is not the model: it is proprietary data, workflow integration and the trust of expert users.
• Starting narrow — focusing on a precise segment rather than expanding immediately — can be the best way to build a defensible moat.
• Seemingly boring markets produce the most resilient startups because the customer's pain is real and urgent, and whoever solves it becomes critical infrastructure.