He spent years complaining that the tools of the debt markets were broken. Then he quit banking and built the fix.
Former J.P. Morgan leveraged-finance analyst. Trained as a lawyer. Now runs a $1.3 billion company teaching AI to read a $145 trillion market.
A software founder photographed the way software founders are: soft light, exposed brick, a quarter-smile that has closed a $170 million round and knows it.
The thing Steven Hunter runs is called 9fin, and the shortest honest description of it is a company that reads bond documents so that humans do not have to. The debt markets - high yield bonds, leveraged loans, private credit, the whole plumbing of how large companies borrow money - run on paperwork that is long, dense, and, until fairly recently, mostly unsearchable. An analyst who wanted to know a single covenant, one clause governing what a borrower is and is not allowed to do, could spend a good part of a week finding it. Hunter's pitch is that a machine can do that in minutes, and that the machine only works if you feed it data nobody else has.
That last part is the whole argument. Everyone in finance in 2026 has an AI slide. Hunter's version comes with a condition attached: "AI will redefine the credit markets, but only if it's powered by proprietary data and embedded into how professionals actually work." The model is not the moat. The data is. 9fin employs reporters who break news, engineers who structure the documents, and a platform that stitches the two together. The stated ambition, which he says out loud and puts in press releases, is to be "the only platform credit professionals ever need." Most founders shrink their vision to sound realistic in interviews. Hunter does the opposite.
In March 2026 investors agreed with him to the tune of $170 million, a Series C round led by HarbourVest that valued the company at $1.3 billion. One of the participants, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, had been a paying customer before it became a shareholder, which is either a nice endorsement or a slightly awkward negotiation, depending on how you look at it. The company has now raised north of $250 million in total and sells to more than 300 of the largest banks, asset managers, hedge funds, and law firms in the world.
"Our ultimate goal is to be the only platform credit professionals ever need."
The debt markets were the last big corner of finance to get properly digitized. Equities had screens and tickers for decades. Bonds and loans lived in PDFs. 9fin's bet was that the boring, unglamorous work of reading those documents was worth doing at scale - and that speed was the product.
Hunter did not start in code. He read Law at the University of Bristol and came out with a First, which is a useful thing to know about a person whose company's core skill is reading contracts very carefully. From there he went into leveraged finance at J.P. Morgan in London, then to Babson Capital Management as an investment executive covering European high yield bonds and leveraged loans. This is the desk-side view of the market - the one where you feel, personally and daily, how bad the tools are.
In 2016 he and Hussam El-Sheikh, an engineer out of Deutsche Bank and his university roommate, quit their jobs to build 9fin. They sketched the company's values on a kitchen table before there was a product or a customer, which is the kind of detail that sounds like founder mythology until you remember that most companies never write their values down at all, let alone before they exist. Hunter has said in interviews that his father's blunt advice about winning is part of what drives the company. The culture line he repeats is that celebrating wins matters as much as the ambition to chase them.
Reads Law, graduates with First Class Honours. The document-reading habit starts early.
Analyst on the Leveraged Finance team - his first real exposure to how the debt markets actually move money.
Investment executive covering European high yield bonds and leveraged loans. The frustration compounds.
Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh quit banking, sketch their values on a kitchen table, and start building.
Headcount pushes past 350; the company grows quickly across the UK and US, staying deliberately tech-first.
HarbourVest leads a round at a $1.3 billion valuation. A former customer, CPP Investments, joins as an investor.
AI will redefine the credit markets, but only if it's powered by proprietary data and embedded into how professionals actually work.
Our ultimate goal is to be the only platform credit professionals ever need.
That's exactly what we've built at 9fin.
He trained as a lawyer before he ever touched a bond - a First in Law from Bristol.
His co-founder came from the engineering side of Deutsche Bank. Hunter came from the deal side of J.P. Morgan. Two halves of the same problem.
One Series C investor, CPP Investments, was already paying to use the product before it wrote a check.
The name plays on "9 to 5" and "fin" - a small joke about the finance grind the company set out to automate.
9fin says its platform compresses weeks of manual credit research into minutes.
The values were written on a kitchen table in 2016, before there was anything to have values about.
Hunter talks ambition, culture, and the US push in a conversation produced by 9fin investor Redalpine.