£2.3m · Seed · Fintech · Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Newcastle fintech Noggin HQ has raised £2.3m in an oversubscribed seed round led by Blackfinch Ventures, with continued participation from Oxford Capital and Bethnal Green Ventures and backing from specialist angels including former TotallyMoney CEO Alastair Douglas. The round coincides with the company's authorisation to provide credit-reference services, and will support its move from lender pilots into wider market adoption, according to BusinessCloud's original report.
Transaction data becomes a lending decision layer
Noggin was founded by childhood friends Evangeline Atkinson and Laura Mills after both were declined for credit despite being employed and paying regular bills. Their product uses permissioned bank-transaction data to assess applicants whose conventional credit files may be thin or outdated. The company says its platform turns raw Open Banking or statement data into three layers: transaction categorisation, income and affordability insights, and a dynamic RiskIntel score that forecasts monthly probability of default across a one-to-18-month horizon. Lenders can test the system on historical portfolios and then consume the outputs through an API, as described in Noggin's current product materials.
The commercial promise is not simply a different score. Noggin is trying to sit inside a lender's existing decision workflow, where better classification of income, spending and emerging risk can expand approvals without loosening loss controls. The company reports that recent backtests identified 15.7% more creditworthy applicants while allowing fewer defaulters through than a leading credit-reference provider. Those are company claims rather than independently audited benchmarks, but they set a concrete test for deployments: each lender can compare uplift and default performance on its own book before committing to production.
Authorisation raises the execution bar
Credit-reference authorisation gives Noggin a route to provide cashflow-based credit data to regulated lenders, turning a pilot-stage model into potential infrastructure. It also raises the standard the company must meet around consent, data quality, model monitoring and consumer outcomes. Noggin's privacy notice says it processes transaction histories, balances, income, regular spending and affordability indicators for credit-risk scoring, while excluding traditional bureau histories unless separately stated. That distinction is central to the product: Noggin must prove that live financial behaviour adds signal where legacy files are incomplete, without creating a second opaque decision system.
The seed round follows a £710k pre-seed led by Oxford Capital in 2024. This time Blackfinch Ventures leads, while earlier backers Oxford Capital and Bethnal Green Ventures continue. Capital helps fund the step from successful pilots to repeatable integrations, but the durable advantage will depend on maintaining model performance as lender portfolios, borrower behaviour and economic conditions change.
Sources checked:
BusinessCloud · Noggin HQ product site · Noggin HQ privacy notice · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
