Fundthrough revenue, CEO Steven Uster, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2022.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is steven uster he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called fund through before fund through he was an investment banker in new york first at ubs and then as a founding employee of centreview partners stephen is an mba from the wharton school and a bachelor of commerce with honors from mcgill university all right stephen you already take us to the top i am all right so your cool factor goes up uh at least for my audience when you leave you know big fintech and you start your own company so you're already ahead of the ball here tell us what fun through does and how you guys make money for sure so we are reimagining uh invoicing so that small businesses can get paid instantly essentially bridging that gap for companies that invoice their customers and those customers take 60 90 sometimes 120 days for them to pay them yep okay so let's role play here for a second there's a lot of people competing in the space and really it's a function of your cost of capital what you're raising you're dead at and what you're lending it at and there's a spread so let's say a sas company is listening right now and they have a hundred thousand dollars and committed annual contract value uh that is not that's paid quarterly and they want to get that money you know three months ahead of time on each quarter payment what could you offer them on a hundred thousand dollar acv yeah so uh typically by the way we we we do work with sas companies uh but our core users are either tech companies or non-tech companies that just invoice for products or services to large typically larger customers and then wait uh to get paid but on that hundred thousand dollars large by the way sorry stephen what's large well so we have folks on our platform who have you know a hundred thousand dollars for your example we have folks on our platform who have actually 10 million dollars uh outstanding that wouldn't be one invoice that would be you know a lot of different invoices on the low end we actually have folks on our platform we have 500 and these are just micro businesses who are selling typically to smaller businesses uh but our sweet spot tends to be in the hundred thousand to a million okay someone that so someone that's listening right now if they are sending out invoices could be one or a thousand that add up to between a hundred thousand and a million their potential great fit for fun through yes absolutely so tell us more how does it work yeah so uh all you would do is connect a couple of your data sources connect your invoicing platform let's say you use quickbooks online uh all of your invoices would show up on our uh our platform you click the one that you uh you want to fund uh we would verify that that invoice uh is uh accurate and that you've completed the work that you said that you were going to be doing or deliver the product that you said you were going to and then the money will be in your account uh usually that same day uh once you're on board okay so again let's be specific here let's say someone's saying they have a contract that's a 10 000 contract they sent the invoice to the customer and the customer has 60 days to pay they don't want to wait 60 days what will you give them today on that 10 000 invoice yeah so on that 10 000 invoice we might advance them you know 9 900 or something um and then uh so there would be a hundred dollar fee um it may be it may range somewhere between you know nine thousand and ninety nine hundred out of that ten thousand so how do you come up with that right so the effective cost of the capital advance is whatever the delta is between the 10k and what you advance so what is that typically yeah so it's typically somewhere in the range of one to two percent a month or one and a half to two percent a month uh so the way we like to think about it is it is cheaper than giving a discount to your customer to getting paid early um you know and when you go and you talk to small business owners and ask them if they're ever given a discount to their customers you'll get things in the range of oh yeah for sure i've given a two percent discount or i've given a 10 discount and nobody ever does sort of the apr on what that is it's really on the margin yeah and what we're trying to say is never do that it's always better to use an invoice funding platform such as fun through and obviously well i want to jump into that because you have a lot of people competing in this space some from your backyard right so you have clear bank that is doing a lot of this interesting thing you've got espresso which was essentially shred financing they're not getting more aggressive with rbfs and term loans even uh sas capital lighter cap there's so many people playing in the space and then you have the pure play kind of you know advanced you know arr advanced kind of solutions like or at least for sas which it sounds like what you're doing invoice advances so we did try and back in the way to compare all these folks is to try and back into a true apr right so if i'm going to pay you you're going to advance 9 900 on a 10 000 contract so it's a hundred dollars that's what it costs me to save that two months right multiply obviously at a year that's 600 on 10k you can back into essentially a six percent effective apr am i doing that math correctly yeah that that math is correct the other thing that i would uh i would say that is is different is what's interesting is there are a lot of players in the capital space and a lot of them uh you've just you've just mentioned they all actually do really different things uh and it is our job and you know the industry's job to actually demonstrate to small business owners in which case you would want to use one versus versus another the interesting thing about fun through is uh relative to say a loan uh which was what the other ones that you were talking about are all uh are all loans is that when you take a loan you get the money up front and you spend the money and that's great but now the money's gone and you hopefully have used it to generate revenue or you know more cash but at some point you've got to find a way to repay the loan yeah that's different than what we do uh all we're doing is advancing your payment so we are waiting so that you don't have to but you know that ultimately your payment is going to come because you've delivered the goods or the service so you know your invoice is going to get paid and all you want to do is get paid faster it wouldn't make sense if the check is in the mail kind of uh and you have an opportunity to buy more inventory or you know want to make payroll to take out a longer term you know loan um with some of the folks that you may be referring to if all you need is to bridge that short term gap so so when did you leave the bank and launch this company so i moved back from new york to toronto in 2009 and i never intended on starting this company um i went out there with the the goal of actually going out and buying and operating uh a company and that was the center of iowa firm where they were you doing kind of growth majority buyouts there no centerview was an m a boutique investment bank so it competed with goldman sachs and ubs and others but all they did was mna they didn't have a financing arm they didn't have a capital markets at that time so when i moved back the goal was to actually go out and and buy a business but when i spoke to all these uh small business owners they would say things like yeah i'm interested in you telling me how much my my business might be worth if you want to acquire it but take into account that my customers are taking longer and longer to pay me a bank won't lend to me because after the crisis and i might be asset light or too small or just don't fit their credit profile and i've got this gap but i've got a stack of purchase orders that i if only i had the capital i would be able to fill and i've got a stack of invoices uh they're just taking longer and longer to pay so i took a bit of a detour and i had never heard the term factoring i'm embarrassed to say uh you know having an undergraduate degree in finance having been working on wall street having an mba in finance i had never heard the term factoring but what i realized was that when you sell to high quality customers you're creating an asset and you should be able to use that asset and no other asset as a way of being able to get the capital that you need so what year was your first advance 2014 june 2014 we made our first advance so i mean what the hell were you doing for between 2009 2014 that's five years old uh so between 2009 and...