Divine raises $6.6M to scale undercollateralized lending

Traditional credit was built for people who already have money. Requirements for credit history, collateral, and costly underwriting create insurmountable barriers for those who need capital most—over 1.4B people lack access to credit. A vendor in Lagos earns cash daily but can't prove a steady income. A Colombian nurse with years of perfect informal repayments remains invisible to banks. Most lending systems spend a lot to guess who will repay—and yet so many who are creditworthy still can’t get a loan.

We built Credit to work differently—to reveal creditworthiness through a borrower’s actual behavior. Since launching in December 2024, Credit has issued over 175,000 loans to more than 100,000 unique borrowers using stablecoins on World Chain, with decisions and settlement in seconds and no paperwork, collateral, or data beyond a wallet address. To scale Credit worldwide, we raised a $6.6M seed round led by Paradigm, with participation from Nascent and strategic angel investors.

The design is simple: start small, earn trust, then scale. New users begin with small limits and can progress to $1,000 by repaying on time. If someone intends to default, the economically rational move is to do it early—at minimal cost to the system. This progression makes creditworthy borrowers self-select in and strategic defaulters self-select out. Building history to default on larger amounts is unprofitable. The screening lives at the incentives layer, making traditional underwriting unnecessary.

For borrowers, Credit is available on the World app as MiniApp to over 15M human-verified users: open the app, request funds, receive them in seconds, repay, unlock more. Most borrowers use Credit for non-crypto expenses—groceries, baby formula, medicine, transportation, utility bills. In Argentina, they’ve nicknamed it “la salvación del mes”—the month’s salvation. Growth has been largely word-of-mouth because a simple promise keeps paying off: they can rely on Credit when it matters most.

Interest rates are calibrated to cover expected losses while remaining competitive with other options. Onchain execution removes operational overhead—the same protocol serves a rider in Córdoba and a shopkeeper in Nairobi. Stablecoins eliminate currency risk and enable instant, borderless settlement. The result is a global lending product with near-zero marginal cost per loan.

On the supply side, anyone can provide liquidity at credit.cash. Deposits are open and currently capped at $2M while we scale prudently. Funds are allocated programmatically. The interest rate adjusts automatically based on liquidity utilization—when more loans are needed, rates rise to attract capital; when supply exceeds demand, rates decrease to attract more borrowers.

We're using the seed financing to scale and expand Credit. This means hiring talent to make the product even more useful and intuitive. See our open roles.

If there’s one takeaway, let it be this: undercollateralized lending works at scale when incentives are engineered correctly and the product meets people where they are. That’s what Credit demonstrates in practice.

September 25, 2025