Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services
Does it take your users 15-90 days to get paid out by their customers? You can embed a factoring product that gives them the option to get paid instantly for a small fee. Do your users purchase materials, supplies, inventory, or equipment on your platform? Embed a loan in your platform to give them timely access to capital to help them spread out upfront project costs, take advantage of wholesale rates on their purchases, or invest in more assets for their business.
We’ve been in the lending space since 2014 and have helped tens of thousands of small businesses acquire financing. We saw the struggles on both sides: how tough it is for small businesses to find the right lending products and how difficult it was for lenders to find the right customer at the right time. Companies like Square, Shopify and Stripe have launched capital programs for their users that allow them to get better priced, more timely funding for their business than they could elsewhere. It’s helped their business customers invest in themselves, grow and transact more, and made them more loyal to those services. And we're only scratching the surface!
The problem is that launching lending programs is complex, timing consuming and costly. It can take a team of 10 at least a few million dollars and 18+ months to get to market with their program. It takes significant upfront commitment and investment, making it very risky. This means the lending services aren’t offered and businesses don't get access to the capital they need.
It is really gratifying to see the impact of providing increased access to capital. We’ve seen restaurants who invested money in a digital transformation not only survive through the pandemic, but double their revenues and improve their margins by embracing take out and delivery. We’ve seen an HVAC company gain the ability to hire more technicians and triple the amount of customers they are able to service on a given day. A home renovation contractor was able to spread out his upfront costs over time to take on multiple projects at once, increasing his monthly revenue by 3x over the past 6 months. An ecommerce company was able to purchase inventory at wholesale rates and invest in an ad campaign to drive traffic to their store to increase sales by 240%.
We provide all of the infrastructure and tools to make it easy to launch capital products that can have this impact for small businesses. We’ve had platform customers get a lending program up and running in a day. You can customize the funding products and experience based on the needs of your own customers. You can use our platform to build a data advantage and more efficiently go to market with your own funding service. We have a lending API, pre-built customizable applications, lending service provider aggregation API, white-labeled sales and support teams to walk customers through the process, and connections into 85 of the top lenders and funding products available to businesses. We also can spin up custom endpoints to add new data points to underwriting models to help businesses obtain better rates/terms and to deliver a better experience. We are paid by 3rd party lenders for the work we do to onboard the small business for funding, and we split those fees with our platform partners. If you build your own funding service, you simply pay a subscription for using our tools.
We’re live and integrated with 32 platforms and are processing thousands of business financing applications per month. We successfully helped businesses access millions of dollars from best-in-market lending services. We also have customers who've used the data from their lending program to build their own custom funding products on Lendflow.
We’d love to hear how we can build better in-product lending experiences with you. The possibilities in lending are just starting to be explored. We're super excited to build the next generation of lending products. We’d love to hear your thoughts, please leave your feedback below!