Gabriela Campoverde wants to help direct more capital to immigrant small business owners – and do this by improving the efficiency of the process. And, she says, if your first attempt doesn’t work, just keep trying.
When her first attempt, becoming a money lender, failed, she switched. She formed concretely Mirena venture with a platform that aims to help banks invest in low-to-middle-income communities, monitor those investments, and ultimately increase the flow of funding to small businesses.
With a background in financial services, Campoverde worked in marketing, project management and cybersecurity at American Express and Goldman Sachs. But she had a long-standing interest in fintech and was also frustrated with what she saw as a lack of products for working-class immigrant communities.
Then, in 2020, while attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Campoverde learned about the gap in access to finance for minority small business owners, especially Latinos. And while quarantining with her family at home in Queens, she saw how difficult the experience of the pandemic has been for much of her community.
With that in mind, while still in school, she went door to door talking to small business Latino immigrants about their financial situation and how they had obtained seed money. Through those interviews, she gained a better understanding of how these small businesses gained access to affordable capital and the lack of resources available to them.
An idea and a pivot
That sparked an idea for a company: a company that would lend money to small Latino businesses, using criteria other than the usual information needed to assess a company’s creditworthiness. It would also educate borrowers on topics such as preparing and applying for a loan. But, “When we tried to raise affordable capital for the idea, we failed,” she says. That’s mainly because capital providers, feeling these were risky ventures, pushed to price that risk accordingly.
So Campoverde turned around and late last year began talking to microcredit providers and others who typically lend to small, high-risk businesses and tap money provided by larger financial institutions. Under the Community Reinvestment Act, banks are required to invest in low-to-middle-income communities. Of course, making those loans isn’t profitable because it takes so long to underwrite. So banks are mostly microcredit providers operating within these communities.
But many lenders, she found, had inefficient systems, sometimes still using manual data entry, multiple Excel sheets, or many separate systems, copying and pasting data from one program to another. “Things can easily fall through the cracks,” says Campoverde.
A better approach, she realized, would be to develop software that could improve the efficiency of these institutions, ultimately helping them serve more customers and deploy more capital. So Campoverde created loan origination and maintenance software aimed at microcredit providers to help them evaluate applications and track their loans. That could also free up time so lenders can spend more time providing technical assistance to small business owners. It went live last autumn in a pilot that is still running with two institutions.
Now Campoverde and chief technical officer Luke Fraker are developing another product that will allow financial institutions to monitor CRA investments and aggregated data. Microcredit providers and others who receive money from banks must report on things like the number of jobs created or changes in a company’s earnings. But mostly they send all that information to banks through the same disparate systems they use internally. That means it can be a time-consuming struggle to collect all the data they need. The new product streamlines the process and provides a more efficient, faster way to aggregate the information.
Campoverde has raised about $250,000 from contests, much of it with the AWS Impact Accelerator she recently completed. She has plans to raise a seed round next year.
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