Arc Launches First AI Platform For $2 Trillion Private Credit Industry

Designed by private credit veterans, Arc Intelligence equips credit investors with modern decision-making tools powered by AI

Built on a proprietary $4bn private credit marketplace, Arc's AI platform helps lenders automate processes that would typically take deal teams several weeks in a matter of minutes

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Arc, the leading capital markets and cash management platform, today announced the launch of Arc Intelligence, the first AI platform designed to automate complex financial tasks for private credit. Arc Intelligence's initial product, the AI Private Credit Analyst ("AI Analyst"), empowers credit teams to make more confident investment decisions faster, with 99% accuracy on complex financial analyses. It allows investors to ingest unstructured private company financial data and generate detailed credit memos, transforming a process that would typically take deal teams several days to a matter of minutes.

Don Muir, CEO and Founder of Arc, said: "Artificial intelligence will revolutionize private investing. After two years of building our AI product, we have cracked the code on financial automation. Arc Intelligence is poised to transform the way deals get done."

As a former private investor, Muir explained: "Our AI platform was built hand-in-hand with the world's leading private credit investors, who are active members of Arc Capital Markets. Our private credit marketplace, which actively processes billions in loan volume, has empowered Arc's AI engineering team to develop a proprietary technology capable of completing complex financial analysis with near-perfect accuracy."

Credit funds have historically relied on offline and manual processes to collect, enrich, and analyze borrower data before producing cleanly-formatted reports. This archaic model of slow data ingestion and repetitive financial analyses means that credit analysts spend days developing a basic picture of the businesses they're evaluating. Arc Intelligence changes that.

The private credit market has grown 50% over the past three years and is projected to grow to $2.8 trillion by 2028, according to Morgan Stanley. That massive demand for credit has prompted participating funds to accelerate their adoption of technology across their operations, from deal origination to diligence to risk monitoring. Arc Intelligence equips lenders to run a more efficient qualification and underwriting process, without sacrificing precision on quantitative analyses.

"Artificial Intelligence has promised to transform the way we work, but it wasn't until Arc that we saw what was really possible. As an early user of Arc Intelligence, I've seen firsthand how radically AI will transform our business, and the private credit industry more broadly," said BJ Lackland, co-founder and Managing Director of Equal Capital, a fast-growing private credit fund focused on the innovation economy.

Steven Rea, President of ATEL Ventures, a San Francisco based multi-billion dollar private credit investor for growth companies said, "We are excited about the potential of Arc Intelligence to enhance our business by improving ATEL's credit and underwriting process. The use of AI will help enable us to increase productivity and reach better and faster decisions for our customers."

Arc's AI Analyst is the first vertical AI solution for the private credit industry, focused on deal underwriting and financial analysis. Acting as a co-pilot to credit investors, Arc dramatically accelerates the due diligence that goes into a deal. First, it automatically ingests, standardizes, and labels company financials from multiple data sources provided via file upload or external data room integration. This information is further enriched with public third-party data and proprietary data from a repository of the lenders' prior deals.

Next, the AI Analyst completes a credit analysis tailored to the lenders' credit parameters, outputting a comprehensive and customizable credit memo. These memos help lenders better assess how well a given company fits their credit box, benchmark the opportunity against relevant competitors and other companies in the fund's portfolio, and understand performance risks. With Arc's AI Analyst, lenders can also query financial data using custom natural language prompts to answer key questions about a business. This combination of automation and deep analysis allows teams to reach a credit decision in a matter of minutes. 

Arc's AI Analyst launched in private beta in September and is available to over 150 institutional lenders active in Arc Capital Markets, the private debt marketplace announced earlier this year. New lenders can join Arc's waitlist for early access. Arc plans to make the AI Analyst generally available to all qualified lenders in early 2025.

Through its AI-powered Capital Markets and Cash Management platform, Arc is becoming the financial system of record for private companies and investors. Now serving thousands of active users, Arc helps private companies manage everyday finances and tap into the private credit markets with intelligent financial products. Arc Intelligence aggregates this unstructured financial data to bring liquidity and transparency to historically opaque and offline private markets.

About Arc: Arc is the capital management platform for ambitious companies and lenders. Arc serves the innovation economy with intelligent cash management and capital markets solutions, in partnership with leading financial institutions and a proprietary network of private credit funds.

Founded in 2021, Arc has headquarters in San Francisco and New York City. It has raised over $180 million of equity and debt capital from investors including Left Lane Capital, NFX, Atalaya, Bain Capital Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, Torch Capital, and Y Combinator, among others. To learn more, visit www.joinarc.com.

Arc is a financial technology company, not a bank. For important information about Arc, see our general disclosures.

Contact: Eden Hoffman; [email protected]

SOURCE Arc