It’s been a hugely exciting time at Credit Karma the last couple of months. As you might have read in the news, we closed a $175 million Series D financing round at the end of June, to help us drive major new additions to our product that we think will make Credit Karma an even more efficient and effective tool.
This new financing round was great news and involved a lot of hard work. It also led us to focus closely on where we felt that the Credit Karma product might be headed.
More than 40 million people in America use Credit Karma’s information and resources to help them manage $2.3 trillion in reported household debt. One-in-six Americans with a credit profile at one of the major credit bureaus are now using Credit Karma. It’s the type of widespread adoption we could only dream about when we launched our service seven years ago.
As happy as we are with our progress, we also know we can develop our product much further. The level of insight we have into the issues that tens of millions of Americans face when managing their personal finances, we believe places us in a position to try and build Credit Karma into a singular financial platform that can anticipate consumers’ needs and serve as a helpful resource when it matters most in managing their personal finances.
As Credit Karma moves into the future, our plan is to provide our members with an online financial identity that they never had before. We’ll remain a strong advocate for our members, letting them know when their credit score changes or if there’s a lower interest rate available for their loan. We intend to invest even more heavily in data science, the goal being continued improvement in how we identify potential savings for members and push approval rates even higher for applications that go through our site. We hope to bring about a future where members will only have to complete a full application after they’ve found out if they’ve been approved.
As a company, we hope that this is just the beginning of an even more complete transformation of personal finance. Over the past eight years we’ve brought about new levels of ease and transparency in personal finance and we plan to expand upon this legacy. Our hope for our product is that one day members will be able to apply for financial products freed from piles of forms, able to share a minimum amount of data but still be able access a large number of lenders. Our intent is that, hopefully, our members will one day be able to use Credit Karma to manage their full financial identity, able to do everything from consolidating student loans, customizing insurance quotes, getting the best credit card for their unique credit profile and financing their first car. It is our intention that these application experiences don’t have to always be as frustrating and confusing as they are today.
We’re investing in new technology to realize new capabilities, while maintaining the same commitment we’ve always had to empowering consumers with the information and tools they need to take control of their financial health.
Credit Karma was founded to make a real difference in people’s financial lives. Knowing that we’ve had an impact is tremendously validating, but it gives us an incredible amount of energy in our jobs each day to know that our journey is so far from finished.
Best,
Kenneth