Steven Hunter is the CEO and co-founder of 9fin. In this blog he wraps up a monumental 2024, and discusses the three factors that make 9fin successful — its people, mission and values.

It’s been an incredible year for 9fin. We’ve launched a new hub in Belfast, strengthened our leadership team with multiple senior promotions, added more 9finners to take our headcount to more than 250 — and our ARR has now grown by 400% since the last time we fundraised.

Speaking of fundraising, that was our other big achievement this year. We rounded out 2024 with our $50m Series B round led by Highland Europe. You can read more about this here.

This latest round gives us more firepower to scale and succeed. Highland stood out to me and Huss El-Sheikh (our CTO, with whom I co-founded the business) because they truly understood not just our mission and vision, but also our values and the way we wanted to scale our teams.

Speaking of which, here’s a recap of what we’re trying to build…

Why does 9fin exist?

The world of fixed income was long overdue a shake-up. Even in the 2010s, debt capital markets still felt like they were stuck in the 1980s; trading was very manual, news moved extremely slowly, and it was really hard to find good data.

Huss and I saw this first-hand in the early stages of our careers, and decided to do something about it. In 2016, we founded 9fin to bring credit markets into the 21st century — to put all the tools leveraged finance professionals need to outperform their peers on one single platform.

Since then, this company has gone from an idea we came up with at our kitchen table to a trusted platform used by nearly 200 of the world’s largest financial firms, with hundreds of employees across London, New York, and Belfast.

A lot has changed since those early days, but three constants help us stay true to our vision: our mission, our values, and our people.

Organising the world’s debt information

We’re on a mission to make the world’s debt information accessible and useful through technology.

Our platform uses cutting-edge tech to deliver news to customers faster than traditional media sources. We were way ahead of the curve with generative AI, leading the market with our integration of this revolutionary technology into our platform.

It ties back to one of our core values: technology doesn’t serve the business, technology is the business.

There’s a ton of potential in this industry to reshape how things are done, and we’re doing this with technology. We think it’s a huge opportunity, so we’re aiming high — with a vision to become the number one global provider of data and analytics in debt capital markets within this decade.

Find out more about our vision here.

Focus on culture and values

Before Huss and I even came up with a name for our company, we created our values. These 11 principles were inspired by some formative experiences in our early careers. We wanted to build a healthy, collaborative environment that set the standard for workplaces in the industry.

Some of our key values include:

Family and health come first

It’s important to understand that no customer or job matters more than family and health. We wanted to emphasise this in writing. You can find out more about this value in this interview with Tom Hudson, our Senior Software Engineer.

Talent trumps experience

We judge people by the quality of their ideas, and the impact of their work — not the duration of their employment. We’d rather work with people who have spent 12 months being awesome than those who have spent three years being average.

Make time for others

Everyone’s busy, but sparing 5-10 minutes of your day to help a colleague isn’t a huge ask — we want to be a business that’s approachable by nature, and works to make sure everyone is succeeding.

Check out this blog for more on our culture and values.

Our amazing team

Our hiring process has gotten stronger and stronger over the past year. Earlier in 2024 we did a recruiting push for our engineering team, and hired more than 30 people in a very short timeframe. Every engineer we offered a job accepted the position, and took no longer than a day to make their decision.

Our current employee satisfaction rate is well above industry averages. Not only do people join, but they stay for the long run — check out what Sean Löfgren, Head of Data Science (and our first ever hire) had to say about his incredible run at 9fin.

We more than doubled engineering headcount over 2024 as we launched new products. I’m excited to scale the business even further over 2025, with a particular focus on tech innovation and automation — exploring how we integrate tech into our platform to deliver even more value, and faster.

This growing team will help us achieve even more in the New Year, as we double down our tech and AI capabilities and continue to build our presence in the US.

Want to join us on this journey? Great news — we’re hiring! Check out our careers page for open roles.