FormZapper is headed to St. Louis to be part of the 14-week SixThirty accelerator.
The Kansas City-based startup provides a secure platform for lenders and attorneys to generate commercial loan documents. The platform expedites the collection of loan documents and collaboration across the lending team and the legal team.
Last week, FormZapper joined the accelerator with three other financial technology companies, including Gremln from St. Louis, PromisePay from Australia and Wealth Access from Nashville.
SixThirty was founded by Square co-founder Jim McKelvey and provides startups with funding, mentors and connections to the top financial services companies in the country—an industry St. Louis is well-known for.
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Backed by the St. Louis Regional Chamber and venture capital firm Cultivation Capital, SixThirty has a spring and fall class with four startups each. It also has $100,000 of funding to hand out for the year.
Co-founders Andy Kallenbach and Jan Valencia are excited about the opportunity for connections and growth.
“We are particularly pleased to have been accepted into SixThirty’s second class, which includes a significant round of seed funding,” he said. “The SixThirty team fully understands our value proposition, the lending industry and the financial tech space.
“We could not have asked for a better situation to help grow our company.”
Kallenbach has 20 years of form automation experience working with commercial insurance, including the industry’s top companies. Valencia brings more than 20 years of experience in commercial and residential lending working for Commerce Bank and CommunityAmerica Credit Union.
Starting off as more of a consultant, Kallenbach was told by customers that he should look at real estate lending because the process was stuck in the ’80s with mounds of paper, repetitive data entry and long wait periods that were cumbersome to businesses that needed loans quickly.
“Some lawyers were bringing in a shopping cart worth of paperwork for a commercial real estate deal,” he told Silicon Prairie News. “We can solve these problems and ultimately it’s exciting to help the banks, but their customers, too.”
FormZapper ultimately provides a more collaborative online process that allows all sides to work faster and more efficiently.
Kallenbach said working around like-minded financial startups will be beneficial.
“There’s direct, hands-on work with people who have a deep expertise and understand each others’ target markets,” he said. “We’ve already been opening doors for each other.”
After the accelerator, Kallenbach said FormZapper will likely return to its KC roots, but maintain a St. Louis office, too.
He said they’ve already cultivated good connections and potential customers in the first week of the accelerator. They’ve had part timers working in St. Louis for about six months, he said.
