Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’m more curious about financial engineering. You have Y Combinator which takes certain equity and gives you a certain amount of cash. After YC, you said you raised a seed round. Then you raised seed extension. As what? Safes, convertible notes, equity financing? Carl Memnon: We raised primarily on YC safes. Sramana Mitra:

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Carl Memnon: The business model is simply on the backend. We split net interest income with our bank partner. They pay us a service fee which is a function of the net interest income that they get. Sramana Mitra: How many bank partners do you have now? Carl

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain Cofounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 5)

Carl Memnon: We have people who have a credit history but have struggled in the past. From talking to users, we’ve discovered that that’s a function of healthcare cost. Hospitalizations, oftentimes, put people in debt. Another is past job loss. That individual now has great cash flow. That user is now looking to repair their

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you launched on the app store while you were in YC, what was the regulatory status? Did you go through all these individual state-wise regulatory approval processes for all of them? Carl Memnon: One of the learnings that came out of Arizona was that we don’t need to be the lender on

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you graduated from Arizona, were you successful in raising funding? Carl Memnon: Absolutely. We spent a lot of time on the product itself and taking the learnings from that program and implementing it into the product. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the sandbox itself was the thing that allowed us to raise

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain Cofounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your competition in this? Carl Memnon: The way we see it and by what’s reflected in our customer base, our primary competitors are the traditional credit cards. Those are our competitors. That’s because the product functions exactly like a credit card in terms of reporting and a revolving line. But there’s

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain Cofounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 1)

Carl discusses Grain’s FinTech innovation, and also some of the unique ways in which his company has been financed. Excellent conversation. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Grain.