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Meet CAFE: Accelerating the Growth of Fintech Startups

The Center for Advancing Financial Equity has named six companies to its Fall 2024 accelerator for fintech startups, an eight-week program that charges no fee and takes no equity.

By Larry Reid

News · · Updated Oct 22, 2026 · 2 min read

Homepage of the Center for Accelerating Financial Equity (CAFE) website shown in a browser window

A Delaware non-profit, the Center for Advancing Financial Equity (CAFE), picked six companies for its Fall 2024 fintech accelerator and announced them on September 25. Participants work through an eight-week schedule that mixes virtual and in-person sessions. It began September 30 and finishes November 25.

Terms

Taking part costs a company nothing, and CAFE neither buys equity nor invests. Best Egg is the lead sponsor. Seven others back the program: the American Bankers Association, Siegfried Advisory, Delaware Prosperity Partnership, Wolf & Co, Delaware Tech Park, Discover Financial Services and deBanked, a trade publication that covers this sector.

Who is in it

Carvertise, GivingCredit, Kredit Academy, Odynn, Prismm and Salus make up the group. CAFE’s announcement describes three of them in terms of credit:

  • GivingCredit wants to widen access to commercial finance by giving credit for peer lending inside communities that banks leave out.
  • Salus operates a digital scoring platform used to underwrite microloans.
  • Kredit Academy sells small and mid-sized financial institutions an education platform plus a secured credit card product.

Each description comes from the companies themselves, passed along by CAFE. The announcement also credits Salus with customer savings; that is a company claim and is left out here.

Why lenders may care

GivingCredit and Salus both bear on how underwriters read applicants that conventional files serve poorly, and Kredit Academy sells to institutions, not to consumers directly. Whether any of the six works on small business funding specifically is not stated, so the link to this industry is indirect for now.

The organization

CAFE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit whose start-up funding came partly from the Small Business Administration. Its focus is the financial health of low- and moderate-income communities, pursued through fintech partnerships. It belongs to the FinTech Innovation Hub in Newark, Delaware.

What is not yet known

The announcement says nothing about results, a demo-day date, or whether any lender or broker will pilot a cohort product. Outputs will only become visible once the program wraps up in late November.

Sources

About the author

Larry Reid

Larry Reid covers merchant cash advance and alternative lending markets for The Fund Scope, from lender strategy and new entrants to the policy shifts that move the industry.