Hello, Zeal community! My name is Andy Will and I joined Nasir at Zeal Capital Partners about a year ago, inspired by the mission to bridge our country's wealth and skills gap through investments across the Fintech and Future of Work sectors. For a bit on myself, I started my career at JP Morgan, trading equity derivatives, before transitioning to a large Family Office, running their public markets trading desk. After attending the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, I joined Listen Ventures, an early-stage brand-focused consumer VC, leading their consumer fintech vertical. After spending 8 years in NYC and Chicago, I finally found my way back home to Washington, D.C., with my wife Jenny, son Henry and dog Cooper. Today, with the support of our growing Zeal community - Our EIRs, Operating Partners, Advisory Board members, Ecosystem Partners, and of course our LPs - I lead our deal sourcing and investment recommendations for Zeal Fund I.
As with all high growth early-stage investments at Zeal, everything starts with founder/market fit. Do they have strong domain expertise? Are they deeply connected to the problem they’re solving? Are they dynamic leaders who can adjust to a changing business climate or market need? Do they surround themselves with a team that possesses complementary skill sets? Do they understand the power of building a diverse, inclusive company? For Esusu, the answer to all these questions was unequivocally YES. Abbey and Samir are two of the most dynamic founders who have built a team that is best suited to re-invent creditworthiness in this country. They both come from a family of immigrants who entered the United States with no credit history, prohibiting them from accessing traditional credit markets. They were forced to take money from payday lenders, charging over 300% interest rates, to get their start in America. This is a story that is far too common for far too many families in the US, particularly low wealth communities and consumers. Through personal connections to the issue at hand, Abbey and Samir vowed to solve this “pain killer” problem through innovation.
Once we understood that the founders were the right people to solve the problem, we evaluated the business model to understand how big the market opportunity could be and how fast the business could reach scale. The Esusu team created their product in a way that drives a strong value proposition for both sides of the platform. For the owner/operators, the Esusu platform drives 25% greater on-time payment, provides predictive analytics around probability of on time payment and gives access to low-interest loans for those having trouble with their rental payment. For tenants, Esusu allows them to go from credit invisible or a poor credit score to above average in a very short period of time. This is because 30-40% of the average person’s financial history comes from rental payments that have not historically been reported to CRAs. Esusu also enables families who are facing financial hardships to maintain a roof over their head with their loan program. It was clear to us that Esusu had not only found an incredibly large market opportunity but created a business model that will allow them to reach scale quickly. The worsening COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted this serious pain point.
Lastly, we love investing in companies where the level of impact scales in proportion to the financial return. It was clear to us that the more successful Esusu became as a business, the greater number of low wealth consumers would be positively impacted. This dynamic is crucial for us to get excited about a company. The more we learned about this incredible business, the more excited we became about how it fit into our Inclusive Investing™ strategy. We couldn’t be more proud to have partnered with the entire Esusu team and look forward to continuing our support on this journey!