The ONCI Story

Back in 2005, ONCI’s founders, Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman, were looking for a working capital loan to support their growing business, a financial research outsourcing company called Copal Amba which they’d launched in 2002.

They approached numerous commercial banks and kept getting variations of the same response – “the computer says ‘No’. Despite being a profitable business with strong cash flow and retained clients, none of the commercial banks were willing to lend to them.

A few months later through one of their institutional client’s special situations desk, they managed to secure 100x the amount of debt for a dividend recap. So, an institutional division of a bank was able to support them, but the commercial lending part of the bank was not. Rishi and Joel ended up scaling Copal Amba to 3,000 employees and in 2014, they sold it to Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO), returning over 200x for seed investors.

The negative experience Rishi and Joel had in trying to secure a loan as a mid-market business inspired the launch of their second business, OakNorth, in 2015. OakNorth is a fully-licensed and regulated bank which has lent over $13bn to businesses across the UK and the US. OakNorth reached cashflow break-even just 11 months after its launch and has been profitable every year since, achieving performance metrics that place it amongst the top 1% of commercial banks globally. This success has largely been driven by the credit intelligence it’s developed that underpins its underwriting, monitoring, and portfolio analysis.

In 2020, as nations battled with a global pandemic and banks tried to navigate the economic shocks it brought, Rishi and Joel were once again inspired to help. They decided to package up the credit intelligence that had enabled their bank to scale so successfully in the UK, into a software-as-a-service offering - ONCI. Throughout the pandemic, ONCI partnered with banks, enabling them to continue confidently lend through the cycle, grow their loan book, and support their customers. Today, we’re proud to call some of the world’s largest banks our customers, and to be working with them as the world faces growing threats such as climate change.