Cognitive Credit, a London company that supplies data, analytics and AI tools for corporate credit research, has raised a $40m strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners. The company announced the deal on 22 October 2026 in a release datelined New York and London.
ETFS Capital, an existing investor that led the company's previous round, also took part. Chris Bon, a partner at Summit Partners, has joined Cognitive Credit's board. EU-Startups put the round at €35.73m.
The company did not disclose a valuation or how the $40m was split between the two investors.
“Demand for credit-specialist technology will continue to accelerate from here, and we are pleased to partner with Summit Partners on our next phase of growth.”Robert Slater, CEO and Founder, Cognitive Credit
What Cognitive Credit does
Cognitive Credit builds structured data on companies that issue bonds and loans, drawn from hundreds of thousands of financial reports. Analysts use it to get standardised credit models and primary filings for more than 3,500 issuers in the US, Europe and emerging markets. The company says every figure it produces can be traced back to its source document, which it presents as the main difference from general-purpose AI tools.
Customers reach the data through a web application, an Excel add-in that streams figures into spreadsheets, a REST API and a connector for Anthropic's Claude assistant. According to the release, the platform supports work at more than 80% of the 25 largest asset managers by assets under management and at all ten of the top investment banks in global debt league tables. Over the past three years, the company said, active users grew by 240% and its issuer coverage more than doubled. These figures come from the company and were not independently verified.
Robert Slater, the chief executive, founded the company in 2017, according to EU-Startups, which reported that it was built by former credit analysts who found that the tools available to them had been designed for equity markets.
What the money is for
Cognitive Credit said the investment will pay for commercial expansion in the US and a new generation of products. The first is DealConnect, which it described as imminent: it is meant to give investors detailed credit models for private companies that share their accounts only through secure data rooms. The second is what the company calls agentic credit analysis, AI software that works on top of its verified data to automate parts of fundamental research. It also plans to extend coverage to more credit markets.
Slater said in the release that more capabilities are planned for 2027. Bon said Summit was backing the company because banks and asset managers need data whose accuracy can be checked when they use AI for high-stakes decisions.
The release framed the opportunity with figures from the OECD's Global Debt Report 2026: nearly $60tn of corporate bonds and syndicated loans outstanding and close to $14tn raised in 2025.
The funding so far
Cognitive Credit raised a £6m (about $8.1m) Series A led by Fitch Ventures in November 2021, according to EU-Startups. In September 2024 it announced a $10m Series B led by ETFS Capital, with XTX Ventures also investing. Pulse 2.0 reported at the time that the Series B brought its total funding to $25m and that annual recurring revenue had risen more than sevenfold since the Series A.
The company did not give a new funding total with this round. Summit Partners is a growth equity firm founded in 1984 that says it has invested in more than 550 companies.
Company website: cognitivecredit.com