Company
Credmark is filling a giant hole in the emerging crypto financial system.
Credit is the grease that allows financial system to function well. Without data, credit can’t exist.
Credmark is producing this data.
Founding
Credmark was founded in 2018 in a remote mountainside village in Italy. Paul, one of our founders, was living there with his wife, child, and innumerable farm animals.
Neil, the other founder, was living in Texas, very far from any farm animals. Paul used to live in Austin where he and Neil met for breakfast every other week. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were frequent topics of conversation.
One day Neil decided to visit Paul to discuss building and global peer-to-peer lending platform on crypto rails. This seemed like a great idea, until they looked for credit data.
And that’s why Credmark was born.
Early Days
A few months later, Credmark (Graychain at the time) was accepted into a blockchain accelerator in Hong Kong.
Crypto is global, so we decided to structure Credmark accordingly. We needed to work in Asia and North America / Europe at the same time. Not normal for a two-person startup!
Austin is too far from Europe, so Neil moved to New York to be in the thick of traditional financial services, and within striking-distance of Chicago and London.
Remote Italian villages aren’t currently hotbeds of crypto activity so Paul moved to Bangkok to be within striking-distance of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Fun fact: more people live in his current apartment building than in the town from which he moved.
Today
As we’ve grown we’ve kept our global focus while paying attention to where we see crypto developing and where we find people prepared for this emerging world.
As a result, finance, design, and cyber-security are based in London.
Nairobi is also an important center for us as Kenya’s embrace of M-Pesa makes it the epicenter of alternative finance on the African continent.