Zebit, Operated by Global Analytics, Raises $30M for U.S. Expansion

Global Analytics Zebit CEO Michael Thiemann (left) and COO Krishna Gopinathan

As a Web-based financial services company, Global Analytics is not exactly a household name—even in San Diego, where the company was founded in 2003.

That seems likely to change in coming months, however. Global Analytics is announcing today it has raised $30 million in debt financing, as the company lays the groundwork to bring its micro-lending services to the U.S. market. While San Diego-based Global Analytics developed the underlying analytics technology, it provides short-term loans and other financial services to “underbanked” consumers through two online operating companies—Zebit and Lending Stream, which currently operate only in the United Kingdom.

Global Analytics may rank as the biggest unknown Web company in San Diego, but it hopes to reprise the success of Falcon Fraud Manager, the multi-factor analytic system created to assess the relative risk of credit card transactions in real time. Krishna Gopinathan, Global Analytics’ co-founder and COO, led the technical team that invented the Falcon system at HNC Software before the San Diego analytics company was acquired by Fair Isaac, the credit scoring powerhouse now known as FICO (NASDAQ: [[ticker:FICO]]).

“Falcon is the most successful product in the history of the payment system business,” says Global Analytics CEO Michael Thiemann. It is used to protect more than 2.5 billion credit cards worldwide, and Thiemann says he has a hard time thinking of anything else that is as widely distributed.

Thiemann also was an executive at HNC. He oversaw HNC Financial Solutions and came out of retirement to join Global Analytics in 2009, which coincided with the company’s first round of outside financing. With the $30 million announced today by Crystal Financial, Thiemann says Global Analytics has raised a total of $95 million ($50 million in equity funding and $45 million in debt) for its Zebit business. San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital has been Global Analytics’ key venture investor, along with Mohr Davidow Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures, QED Investors, and a number of private strategic advisors. The additional capital is expected to enable Global Analytics and its Zebit business (the two entities are basically the same) to grow at 50 percent through 2013 and 2014.

Gopinathan co-founded the company a decade ago with the idea of providing specialized analytics services for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.