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By Laurent Hengesch, Founding Partner of Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital
How a casual conversation between friends turned into one of the defining investments of our first fintech fund – and a reminder that in venture capital, relationships still travel further than spreadsheets.
Most investment stories told in industry magazines start with a thesis. This one starts with a coffee in Berlin.
Sometime in 2021, I was catching up with Marie Wennergren, a good friend of mine who at the time was investing out of Fly Ventures in Berlin. We met, as we often did, somewhere between Mitte and Kreuzberg, and the conversation drifted, as it often does between venture investors, from personal life into deal flow. Marie had recently been looking at a London-based company called 9fin. Her words stuck with me: it was, in her view, one of the best companies she had seen in a long time. Coming from Marie, that was not a sentence to be filed away politely. It was a signal.
That conversation is, in many ways, the reason this article exists.
A company building the rails for global debt markets
9fin was founded in 2016 in London by Steven Hunter, a former J.P. Morgan banker, and Hussam El-Sheikh, a former Deutsche Bank engineer. The premise was as simple as it was unfashionable at the time: debt capital markets – a roughly 145 trillion dollar asset class, the largest in the world – were still being analysed with tools and workflows that had barely evolved since the 1980s. Information that mattered to credit professionals lived buried in PDFs, data rooms, prospectuses and email threads. The bond, loan and, increasingly, private credit markets were converging, and yet the technology stack supporting them lagged decades behind equities.
Hunter and El-Sheikh set out to centralise that information and build the analytical and, eventually, AI-native layer on top of it. The product combines proprietary data, news, covenants analysis, deal predictions and an AI-powered workflow into a single platform – the kind of tool a leveraged finance analyst would have built for themselves if they could.
When we first looked at the company in 2021, the thesis was straightforward to underwrite once you had spent ten minutes with the founders. The market was vast, the incumbents were complacent, and the team understood the workflows of their customers from the inside. The Series A round in October 2021 brought in Redalpine and Fly Ventures as institutional backers, alongside Seedcamp who had been there since the seed in 2017. We participated and welcomed 9fin into our first fintech fund.
A relationship business, not a transaction business
It is worth pausing on this point, because it is the part of the job that rarely makes it into pitch decks or annual reports.
The 9fin opportunity did not come from a banker, a cold email, or a screening tool. It came from a friend. Marie and I had known each other for years before that Berlin coffee, and we will know each other for years after the last of our portfolio companies has exited. Venture capital, particularly at the early stages, is an industry in which information is almost always asymmetric – and the asymmetry that matters most is not what you read in the data room, but what you hear from people whose judgement you have learned to trust.
There is a temptation, especially in a market that has become more crowded and more competitive, to treat fellow investors as competitors first and collaborators second. Our experience, with 9fin and elsewhere, has been the opposite. The investors and operators who shared their best ideas with us five years ago are, more often than not, the ones whose calls we still take first today. Marie’s generosity in sharing what she was seeing is precisely the kind of behaviour that compounds over a career. We were, and remain, very grateful for it.
From Series A to unicorn
From there, the company executed. In December 2022, Spark Capital led a 23-million-dollar Series A+ to support the launch of 9fin’s New York office and accelerate the US go-to-market. By December 2024, Highland Europe led a 50-million-dollar Series B that valued the company at around 478 million dollars, with the platform by then serving the majority of the world’s leading investment banks, distressed advisors and credit-focused law firms.
In late March 2026, 9fin announced a 170-million-dollar Series C led by HarbourVest Partners, with participation from CPP Investments – already a 9fin client before becoming an investor – and existing backers including Redalpine, Highland Europe, Spark Capital and Seedcamp. The round valued the company at approximately 1.3 billion dollars, formally placing 9fin in the European unicorn club and bringing total capital raised to more than 250 million dollars. The proceeds are earmarked for deeper AI capabilities, expansion of 9fin’s proprietary dataset and continued growth in the United States, which has become the company’s fastest-growing region.
Multiple consecutive years of 100 percent ARR growth and industry-leading retention metrics suggest the trajectory is far from done. Notably, the AI thesis that has come to dominate every investment conversation in 2025 and 2026 is, for 9fin, not a pivot but the natural maturation of a strategy that has been in place since the beginning: data first, workflows second, intelligence layer third.
What we take away
There are the obvious lessons – back outstanding founders in large, structurally underserved markets, and re-up when the company keeps proving you right. We did, and we are looking forward to supporting Steven, Hussam and the team in the chapters still to come.
The less obvious lesson is the one we keep coming back to. The single most consequential moment in this investment was not the term sheet, the cap table modelling or the reference calls. It was a coffee in Berlin, with a friend who had no obligation to share what she was seeing, and chose to anyway. That is the part of this industry that no platform, no AI, and no LP report will ever fully capture – and it is the part that, more than a decade in, we still believe matters most.
