Woveo

Woveo builds what it calls a community wallet: a group of people contribute to a shared pot and take turns drawing from it, the arrangement that much of the world already runs its informal banking on. The difference is what Woveo does with the record. It partners with Canada's credit bureaus so that those contributions and repayments become reportable data, which gives newcomers and other non-prime borrowers a credit history that conventional lending never produces for them. Jonah Chininga started the company in 2020 as MICC, after arriving from Zimbabwe to study in Prince Edward Island in 2014 and finding he could not build a credit rating; his co-founders are James Muhato and Sergio Fernandez. The company moved to Calgary in 2022 after winning $60,000 at the Calgary Fintech Awards. On the TechTO stage in June 2024 Chininga said Woveo was working with 72 communities and around 18,000 members, had processed over $2 million in transaction volume and was seeing a 100% repayment rate — which he attributed to where community credit sits in a borrower's spending hierarchy rather than to better risk scoring. The current product line has since widened to small-business lending, with loans up to $25,000 written through partner lenders.