Alternative Financing

Cobalt Intelligence powers verification and underwriting data for alternative lenders, MCA providers, invoice factors, revenue-based financing platforms, and the lending infrastructure that sits behind them. Real-time Secretary of State data, TIN/EIN verification, OFAC/AML screening, court records, and UCC filings all in a single API call, built for the volume and speed that alt-finance operators actually run at.

Use Cases for Alternative Lenders

Here's Theo Mills, CTO at Onramp Funds, on what the partnership looks like day to day:

"Working with the Cobalt team has been a consistently positive experience. They're extremely responsive and proactive about checking in on our company. We rarely encounter issues, but when we do, they address them quickly and thoughtfully. They're also open to feedback and suggestions, which makes problem-solving collaborative and efficient."

The alt-lending workflow breaks down at the same places every time: state-by-state entity verification, ownership confirmation, TIN mismatches, UCC depth, and the speed at which those checks have to resolve inside an applicant flow. Cobalt handles those checks programmatically, which is why operators running thousands of submissions per month use our API to replace the manual Secretary of State portal work that was previously a scale ceiling on how fast they could underwrite.

If you're building or buying alt-lending infrastructure, start with our 2026 guide to Automated Underwriting Systems for small business and alternative lenders, which covers the full pipeline from lead capture through funding decision and maps every data input along the way.

Free Tools for Alternative Lenders

Test our alt-lending data stack before committing. Use the free 50 States SOS API tool for entity verification, or try the Automated Underwriting System free tool for a working demo of how the data plugs into an underwriting pipeline.

For a technical walkthrough, the getting started guide covers authentication, endpoints, and the query patterns used by production alt-lending platforms.

Build vs Buy for Alternative Lending Data Infrastructure

The most common decision alt-lending CTOs face: integrate a verification data provider, or build in-house across 50 Secretary of State portals plus TIN, OFAC, UCC, and court records? The engineering cost is usually underestimated, and the ongoing maintenance is where in-house builds break: state portals change request patterns with no notice, CAPTCHA defenses update, new jurisdictions require new scrapers, and the team that built it rotates off before year two.

Our SOS API vs Building In-House cost comparison walks through the real numbers, including the hidden maintenance burden that most in-house roadmaps miss.

Or schedule a demo to walk through how alt-lenders use Cobalt as the verification data layer in production underwriting pipelines.