At Zeal Capital Partners, we take pride in partnering with exceptional founders and our seventh investment is no exception! Today, we are thrilled to announce our latest investment in Stratyfy, a New York based fintech company led by rockstar founder, Laura Kornhauser! It’s important that we share with our Zeal community why we’re thrilled to say YES to Stratyfy and join them on this journey.
How did we source this company? This is a great “small world” story. Laura and I actually worked together at JP Morgan for three years, sitting just two feet from one another for one of those years. I was impressed by her ability to deeply understand complicated financial instruments and synthesize information in a way that was both coherent and digestible - No small feat for someone selling equity derivatives and structured products. I also admired her ability to remain calm and effectively solve problems under pressure, all while maintaining the utmost respect and integrity. Beyond this, Laura was the main catalyst driving my decision to leave traditional financial services and pursue business school at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I was inspired by her courage to leave JP Morgan after 12 years and enroll in the full-time MBA program at Columbia Business School. This “leap of faith” allowed her to combine her financial services experience and lessons learned in business school with her passion for financial technology. Laura was always the type of person I wanted to stay in touch with and on our most recent call, she shared Stratyfy with me. Needless to say I was immediately drawn to the business and excited to share the opportunity with the broader Zeal team.
What is Stratyfy? Stratyfy is a web based GUI that allows financial institutions and fintech lenders to evaluate and compare a range of different model types - from ML models (Logistic Regression, Neural Net, XGBoost etc) to tradition rules-based models and the models powered by Stratyfy’s proprietary Probabilistic Rules Engine (“PRE”) that combines the best of both worlds. Predictive models built with PRE, provide a unique combination of transparency and accuracy unachievable with other predictive modeling approaches. Transparency is becoming especially important as regulators and compliance departments continue to evaluate potential inequities in underwriting methodologies. This brings us to another core differentiator of the Stratyfy platform, the ability to take a granular approach to identifying and quantifying the amount of bias present within each factor used in an underwriting model. This capability allows the user to identify biased factors, remove them, and understand the impact on approval and default rates. I could go on for days about the power of this platform but hopefully this provides a flavor for some of its capabilities.
Why did we say YES? As with all of our investments, it starts with founder/market fit. We’ve spent the majority of this blog post talking about Laura, given the personal connection and background, but the team she has assembled around her could not be more compelling. Co-founders, Stas Cherkassky (CTO) and Dmitry Lesnik (Chief Data Scientist) bring decades of exceptional technical expertise to building the product. Their CS and DS skill sets perfectly complement Laura’s client-facing disposition and product vision. Beyond the team, Stratyfy’s product is incredibly powerful with a sleek UX/UI that allows customers to easily ingest large quantities of data and improve their underwriting methodology. They are competing in a big market with a best in class product that drives immense impact to marginalized communities. This investment perfectly fits within our Inclusive Investing™ strategy and we believe we can add considerable value through our partnership. Welcome Stratyfy! The best is yet to come!