Eliminate the underwriting tax on American small businesses
Underwriting a small business should be simple. When it is, the financial products they need stop being rare and expensive.
Every financial product carries an underwriting cost
Heron started with a simple observation: a consumer can be underwritten with a score in seconds. A business is still often underwritten by hand, from scratch, every time.
For a lender, the work is largely the same whether the deal is $50,000 or $5 million: bank statements, tax returns, applications, background checks, cash flow, fraud signals, and more.
That work costs money. And that cost gets passed on.
Loans get more expensive. Decisions take longer. Smaller businesses get worse options. And some financial products never get built at all because they are simply too expensive to underwrite.
Nobody sets out to charge it. It simply sits inside the price of every product a small business is offered.
We started where the problem is most acute: short-term business finance. Heron handles the underwriting work end to end — from intake and scrubbing to background checks, cash flow, fraud, and decisioning — and delivers the result directly into the systems funders already use.
Because a lot of what makes underwriting expensive is not risk. It is friction. And friction can be engineered away.
When underwriting becomes faster and cheaper, lenders can serve more businesses, move faster on good opportunities, and build products that were previously uneconomical.
For the business owner, that means less waiting, less paperwork, better access to capital, and more time running the business instead of proving it deserves to exist.
Consumer finance already had this transformation. Small business finance is next. We are building the infrastructure to make it happen.
The business on the other side of every deal. That is who pays the tax.
We decided to fix it
Three co-founders who were friends long before they were colleagues.
Jamie and Johannes met in their first week at Oxford, where they ran a white-tie hire business out of a student house. They met Dom through a mutual friend, and years later, the three started Heron together.
We believed it enough to raise a Series A around it
Backed by Insight Partners and Y Combinator, so we can keep building the layer this market has been missing.
Nobody sees more of small business finance
The numbers behind that claim
Our investors
