At Highway 12 Ventures, we believe the customer/bank relationship has changed. This phenomenon first started during the dotcom meltdown in 2001-2003 and again saw radical change in late 2008. Historically, most small businesses went to the bank on the corner. That is no longer the case as we have all read about the difficulties small companies have in finding working capital to grow their business. Salt Lake City-based Lendio is changing that by matching business owners with debt providers.
The company originally started as FundingUniverse in 2005 and held events such as CrowdPitch, SpeedPitch and BankPitch to match entrepreneurs with angel investors. As a result, they discovered that the majority of companies need debt financing vs. equity capital. They continued to alter their business model to match banks and business owners and helped these owners close over $240 million in loan approvals. Historically this has been a manual process. What we found most compelling was the technology the company was developing to automate both the front end process for the business owners and the back end process for the financial institutions.
We introduced the company to several other venture capital firms which focused on the financial services market as we looked to syndicate the financing and were thrilled when GSA Venture Partners in New York came on board. Lendio has a great team, led by CEO Brock Blake, who have bootstrapped this business since 2005 and got to the point where it made sense to bring in outside investors to really scale the opportunity. We look forward to working with the team at Lendio to build a great company that brings a world class service to business owners.
See TechCrunch article on the release of the new product and the financing.
Link to the actual press release.