The Sharpei Lending Edge: Maria Azofra with Anna Barber
Maria Azofra, co-founder and CEO of Sharpei chats with Anna Barber, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 120: The Sharpei Lending Edge.
In episode 120 of Venture Everywhere, Anna Barber, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Maria Azofra, co-founder and CEO of Sharpei, an AI-native operating system for embedded equipment financing that helps lenders automate and accelerate the loan origination process. Maria shares how building Yakk, a B2B equipment rental marketplace in Spain, exposed a frustrating industry-wide bottleneck: lenders taking 20 to 30 days to approve transactions, losing deals before they could ever close. Sharpei’s vision is to become the origination infrastructure for every lender in the US, modernizing a $1.3 trillion industry that still runs on emails, PDFs, and phone calls.
In this episode, you will hear:
Iterating through multiple business models to find true market pull.
Targeting pre-qualification as lending’s most overlooked bottleneck.
Automating credit file creation from days to hours with AI.
Using lenders as the distribution channel to reach merchants at scale.
Building leasing infrastructure that captures residual asset value.
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Transcript:
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:32 Anna: Welcome to the podcast. I’m Anna Barber, a partner at Everywhere. Very excited to be here with Maria Azofra, the co-founder and CEO of Sharpei. Today Sharpei is an operating system for embedded equipment financing, but it actually started as a slightly different company. Maria, I’d love to start there and talk about what you’re doing today and the genesis of the company.
00:00:55 Maria: Thank you for having me, first of all. Nice to meet you, Anna. We are three founders from Madrid, Spain – Lucia, Julian, and me. The first iteration of Sharpei started seven years ago in Madrid with a company called Yakk. We were a B2B rental marketplace back then.
00:01:13 Maria: By building Yakk, we identified that the industry was super manual, that everything, we needed to ask the end user for a million documents. The bigger problem in the industry wasn’t that vendors weren’t offering renting or leasing online. The main problem was that all the lenders took 20 days to give us a yes or no, an approval. That was the end cost that the end user was not actually renting out the equipment.
00:01:41 Maria: That’s when we decided to come to the U.S. and start Sharpei in San Francisco. The whole thing was building the infrastructure that allows any lender to offer super fast access to capital in the renting and equipment leasing industry.
00:01:55 Anna: That’s so interesting. First of all, in 1999, I was the early team member of a company called Rent Anything. That was a rental platform for consumer equipment, but it was just too early. So what kind of equipment do you deal with? And is it the same across Yakk and Sharpei?
00:02:12 Maria: That’s interesting because Yakk, we started as a peer-to-peer rental marketplace in Spain. The thing was, as you told me, it was a bit early for the market, especially in Spain. We started with mostly electronics, phones, computers, drones, DJ sets, and so on. But the main problem was that everyone was stealing the products.
00:02:35 Maria: So we had to pivot. That’s when we decided to go full B2B. We became one of the biggest rental equipment leasing marketplaces, but very focused on electronics, especially computers and phones for companies.
00:02:48 Anna: That’s so interesting. I like to say being early is the same as being wrong. That’s a tough lesson to learn. But you made this great pivot. You made the pivot to B2B marketplace and then you made the pivot to the financing side. Tell me a little bit about that, how you ended up there, thinking that that was really the interesting business to build.
00:03:09 Maria: We did another pivot in between Yakk and Sharpei version two. That is what we’re doing now. At first, we came to the U.S. with the idea to build a buy-now-pay-later for equipment finance.
00:03:21 Maria: So we were going to merchants saying, “Hey, LG. Do you want to offer equipment finance fully online as if you were offering a traditional buy-now-pay-later like Affirm or Klarna?” We’re seeing that more and more vendors and merchants are putting or adding their B2B online sites. It makes sense to provide the end user with more options to buy at checkout.
00:03:44 Maria: We’re able to have big logos like Mercedes, Ford, LG. We were doing our job correctly in terms of capturing demand. We were creating an embedded equipment finance at checkout. So, the ones doing the underwriting were the banks.
00:03:56 Maria: But even though we were able to get a lot of demand to the banks, the banks weren’t approving anything because they took 20 to 30 days to approve a transaction. So, the end user was leaving to another company or even buying the product instead of leasing it because the banks took very long.
00:04:15 Anna: So, I’m assuming that most of your customers are smaller businesses. And so, it’s just tougher for them to navigate financing. So it sounds like the pain you’re really solving is shortening the time to approval.
00:04:30 Anna: Being their financing partner, you’re really supporting small businesses and being able to get the equipment that they need to run. Who are your customers? Give us a snapshot of who you’re serving.
00:04:41 Maria: Nowadays we are serving small and medium-sized lenders, very specifically in the equipment finance industry. Even though Sharpei is prepared to serve any kind of commercial lending, we’ve been in the equipment finance space for a long time so that’s the first industry that we are attacking.
00:04:59 Anna: So, you’re not serving the small businesses directly. You’re the connective tissue between the lenders and the financial institutions.
00:05:06 Maria: We can speak about this in a minute, but I feel like we were going to the vendors and we were nice-to-have, because we were trying to charge a SaaS fee because we are infrastructure. We were trying to charge the vendors. For the vendors, we were like a payment option. Vendors are used to pay like a take rate per transaction if you’re a payment option.
00:05:27 Maria: As the lenders were coming to us and say, “Hey, guys, can I offer these Sharpei leasing button for my own vendors,” that’s when we decided, okay, maybe it makes sense to go to the lenders and become the lending infrastructure. We can use the banks as the distribution channel to get to the big merchants.
00:05:45 Maria: Because Walmart or LG, they’re already working with the JP Morgan’s of this world and they’re not going to skip JP Morgan or they don’t want to offer lending with other players that Sharpei has integrated. That’s when we decided to move full into the lending infrastructure playbook.
00:06:03 Maria: The go-to-market actually… much more easier because we are offering a white label solution for lenders. In terms of trust, when the customer is going to the checkout, if they see leasing powered by JP Morgan or Wells Fargo, the conversion rates are going to be much higher than if they’re going to see Sharpei.
00:06:22 Anna: You’ve pivoted so many times. You’ve become a master of pivoting, which personally, I think is one of the signals of a really successful entrepreneur. What does it look like and how does it feel different when it’s working? What was it about this version of the idea that you really saw that it was taking off?
00:06:40 Maria: Willingness to pay, actually. I feel like we pivoted so many times that even ourselves, sometimes when we’re explaining what we do, we don’t even know how to explain it correctly.
00:06:51 Maria: But now, the last pivot was six months ago. We did the hard decision to literally let everything go and start from scratch. We told to our current customers like, “Hey, we’re not doing this anymore.” Almost revenue went to zero and we decided to pivot the whole company to this new AI lending layer.
00:07:11 Maria: When we pivoted, all the lenders were coming to us. That’s when it started to feel that this is working, when people are actually using your product and you can feel that you’re building something that they are willing to use on a daily basis. You’re not a nice-to-have.
00:07:27 Anna: It’s great to hear that that flywheel has really started working and you’re seeing it. You’ve worked in circular economy as well as finance. How does your work in circular economy affect what you’re doing now or relate to the business that you’re building today?
00:07:42 Maria: I feel like sustainability and finance are more related than people think, especially in equipment finance and circular economy. When you’re leasing an asset, that asset has to come back. There’s an opportunity to resell the same asset. That’s our first iteration of the product.
00:08:01 Maria: That’s also our ambition: create the whole infrastructure layer that is going to allow people to use every single item on a lease, but then it’s going to be able to make the banks participating in the secondhand of the asset. So it’s really important to see the asset as a long term asset and also be able to calculate the residual value out of it to be able to get more margin from the second rotation.
00:08:28 Anna: I think a lot of circular economy is really about efficiency and leveraging existing resources to avoid the creation of new resources. And so it sounds like you’re doing that in the equipment field.
00:08:41 Anna: You’re also talking about this AI native lending infrastructure. Can you talk about how AI is making your product work better? What is it about the current tech platform transformation to AI that makes the business you’re running now possible for the first time?
00:08:59 Maria: I think now we call everything AI, but Sharpei is building lending infrastructure that has a layer of AI on top of it. For us, equipment financing industry is a super legacy industry, $1.3 trillion industry. Everything runs on emails, PDFs, Excels.
00:09:19 Maria: Mostly 90% of all the workloads in origination are manual. Here in the US, in Spain, in Mexico, what we’ve identified is that every single lender worldwide operates on a manual basis in equipment lending specifically.
00:09:35 Maria: We are very good at connecting the dots. So we connect the vendors with the lenders, the lenders with insurance partners, the insurance partners with the secondhand and the resellers. We build that network and that’s what we call the core infrastructure. But on top of it, we have an AI layer that automates the collection, validation and creation of credit files in minutes.
00:10:00 Maria: What we’re offering on the ROI that we are selling to the lenders is instead of having 30 people working on one transaction and collecting the docs, following up with the phone like, “Hey, you’re missing two documents. The business license is not correct,” we automate that layer of validation of data collection and validation with AI. An AI agent can do this in two hours instead of a human that has to call the end user.
00:10:30 Anna: What’s interesting about that is the borrowers, they have a massive incentive to give you that information because they want to get that loan approved.
00:10:38 Maria: We say that we only give you qualified leads because if a customer doesn’t want to fill out the form, they’re not going to receive a loan. That’s what we do. We’re very centering the origination phase, the pre-qualification.
00:10:52 Maria: There’s been a lot of innovation in the credit, in the underwriting specifically, but no one is doing anything in the pre-qualification step. That is actually the biggest manual and the biggest bottleneck for every lender because every lender receives applications via brokers, email, phones, vendors. So every channel gives the lender the data in a structured way.
00:11:16 Maria: What Sharpei does is we create a unified layer that even though the application comes via email, via phone, via vendor, we structure all this data. We package that into a very clean credit file so that someone can say yes or no. That’s when the human in the loop enters the process.
00:11:36 Anna: Pre-qualification is, in a sense, its own form of underwriting, as you just said.
00:11:42 Maria: And obviously, KYB and KYC.
00:11:45 Anna: What it reminds me of a little bit is in interview platforms, sometimes one of the things employers are looking for is how quickly does a candidate respond to the request for information.
00:11:57 Anna: That shows how interested they are in the job, but also how organized they are and shows other things. So you actually are reading really psychographic signals about potential borrowers.
00:12:09 Maria: This is really interesting because in our past company, fraud was the main issue. I was a data scientist for one of the biggest banks in Europe, BBVA, for a long time. I was in the equipment finance division, but in the fraud, specifically studying why people commit fraud in the B2B business.
00:12:27 Maria: We identified that if you had a new email, and you had a prepaid phone number, you were more keen to commit fraud than if you had a traditional email and that email was logged into Netflix or whatever socials that you had.
00:12:44 Maria: We created our own pre-scoring algorithm in Yakk. So when we were thinking about the pivot, we thought about creating a KYB company because we had so many learnings and so much information about the past company that our first option was creating a new KYC-based on social signals and email on phone validation.
00:13:07 Anna: That’s so interesting because in a sense, your clients aren’t really paying for that, but they’re getting it anyway. You’ve built businesses in Spain and in the United States, so what’s the difference and why here? What was it that prompted you to want to build this here?
00:13:24 Maria: My co-founder and me, Lucia and me, we used to be professional soccer players. We are very ambitious people. We got selected by Draper University in San Mateo. I remember our first day, it was four years ago. We saw this guy, Brett Adcock, the founder of Archer, and now Figure, the humanoid company.
00:13:45 Maria: We saw these guys speaking about humanoids and Silicon Valley. I remember that I looked at Lucia and she was like, “Man, we are playing in second division. We have to be here. If we want to build something great, we need to move.” Two weeks after that, we went home. We shut down the company in Spain and we came to the US.
00:14:04 Maria: Actually, I did my first exit in Spain. I started my company when I was 17. I sold it when I was 20. It was not a big exit. Spain is a very good country in terms of quality of life, but it’s not a country to build businesses.
00:14:17 Maria: When I go back home, everyone was asking me like, “Why are you an entrepreneur? You have the worst life ever.” And here in the US, it’s the other way around. Everyone is building things. You feel so inspired.
00:14:31 Maria: So I feel like that’s the main difference between Spain and the US. The ambition and the best people building businesses are here. We’ve been living in San Francisco for almost two years. The type of people that you meet, the conversations that we have.
00:14:46 Maria: In Spain, of course, we love to party. At 3 a.m. in Spain, I’m at this big party and I’m having a lot of fun. But in SF, I’m speaking about the energy that the protons of the rockets of the NASA.
00:14:59 Maria: So you’re surrounded with so many good people that the learning capacity and the speed of things is much higher than in Europe. I feel not even Spain, the whole Europe. The US is years ahead of Europe in terms of startups and everything.
00:15:15 Anna: What you’re really pointing to is an underlying cultural point of view about the role of entrepreneurship and how people see entrepreneurs. It is interesting how in the United States, we’ve developed a little bit of a… idealization of the whole process of entrepreneurship that really is embedded in the culture here.
00:15:37 Maria: Also, people are much more risk-averse. And if you fail, that’s not a bad thing. For example, I’ve created a lot of companies. Most of them, of course, have never worked. But at the end of the day, all these learnings compound.
00:15:51 Maria: I’ve been a super shitty CEO in my first company, but the second one, I’ve learned from the best. I keep getting all this information and all this knowledge that would make me a very good entrepreneur. I don’t know if now, but maybe in a couple of years. That risk and intrinsic risk that you Americans have is super cool. We have so much to learn from you in that terms.
00:16:16 Anna: You’re teaching me now. I love how you put that about learning velocity and also just reflecting back on how you were a leader in your last company and what this one is like.
00:16:25 Anna: Now you have Sharpei that is working. I’d love to talk about what the ultimate vision is, where you see Sharpei going when it’s fully built out and fully realized. What does it look like?
00:16:37 Maria: The whole goal here is that every lender in the U.S. uses Sharpei for pre-qualifying their applications. I think we’re getting there. We are partnering with a lot of great people to create these distribution channels.
00:16:51 Maria: But of course, it’s a very legacy industry. It’s a very niche industry. We had to create a lot of credibility in the industry to be able to sell to the first customer. Our goal is becoming the infrastructure layer for origination for every lender in the U.S.
00:17:07 Anna: What are the next big challenges or opportunities that are facing you right now as you move towards that goal?
00:17:13 Maria: As we pivoted into this new infrastructure layer, I feel the next challenge would be partnering with the right people so they can resell our solution as white label. So we did, at first, a partnership with Tamarack. It’s the biggest consultancy agency in the U.S. for equipment finance. They’re going to be the ones reselling Sharpei as one of their products.
00:17:37 Maria: For us, the brand doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all about finding these distribution channels that are going to be able to allow us to be in as many lenders as possible. We learned this the hard way because we were going one-by-one to every single lender.
00:17:53 Maria: We are immigrant founders. We don’t have the credibility that we need in the industry. It’s much easier to create a product that is fully resellable by others than having your playbook of direct sales. The challenge is finding the right channels to sell Sharpei to the mass market.
00:18:11 Anna: That’s super exciting to be at this point and having pivoted through so many things and found the one that works. What an exciting moment.
00:18:19 Maria: Now we have to raise again to be able to be in the game for a long time. But we are feeling that we have something between our hands. Super happy to be and also to enjoy this moment because we’ve been entrepreneurs for seven years now together. Now that we have something that the market is getting and that we are feeling the traction finally, it’s going to be a fun moment for us.
00:18:44 Anna: Congrats, Maria. That’s awesome. I’d love to close our conversation with a speed round. Can you tell us what’s a book you’re reading or a podcast that you’re enjoying right now?
00:18:54 Maria: I don’t read so many books. I read a lot online. I’m in love with this podcast, The Diary of a CEO of Steven Bartlett. Literally every single day I listen to one podcast. It’s two hours.
00:19:08 Maria: I spend most of my afternoons hearing about these entrepreneurs and CEOs and experts. I try to apply every single thing that they say into Sharpei. Really interesting, this podcast. I fully recommend it to anyone.
00:19:23 Anna: Okay. Diary of a CEO podcast. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:19:29 Maria: New York. I’m living the full life here. But actually I believe that I would split the year between SF and New York. So six months SF, six months New York and have best of both coasts in the year.
00:19:44 Anna: The perfect coast to coast balance. Okay. What’s your favorite productivity hack?
00:19:49 Maria: I use Granola to record every single meeting to create my follow-up messages. That’s my best productivity hack. And have a lot of coffee at the same time.
00:20:00 Anna: Coffee and Granola, a great combination. So tell the listeners where they can find you if people want to connect with you.
00:20:05 Maria: LinkedIn. I’m very active on that social. I would start my newsletter very, very soon. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and actually I want to help other immigrant founders come to the US.
00:20:20 Maria: I run a Telegram group, one of the biggest ones for Hispanic female founders. We are more than 6,000 people in two years. I have to translate all that community into something bigger. I’m thinking about creating a podcast and a newsletter for female CEOs.
00:20:37 Anna: It sounds like you’ve already built the community, so that sounds like a great idea.
00:20:40 Maria: I try to help. I try to publish things that I use or templates or my email templates for investor updates. But I feel like I don’t have enough time to put into that type of community so, I want to translate that into a more specific newsletter or podcast maybe.
00:20:59 Anna: Great. This has been a great conversation. Maria Azofra from Sharpei, thank you for joining me and best of luck.
00:21:05 Maria: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
00:21:08 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.