Our first investment in Clearbanc (now Clearco) was in Summer of 2015. We weren’t really sure where Andrew and Michele would ultimately take the business, only that we wanted to be on that ride alongside them. Over the years, the journey has taken many twists and turns. We’ve watched them pivot, grind, and execute…and then do it again (and again!). They were absolutely relentless in their search for product/market fit. Once they found it, nobody was going to stand in their way.
Today, Clearco is the world’s largest eCommerce investor. They’ve achieved that milestone by building a technology company rooted in the philosophy that founders everywhere deserve equal access to opportunity through capital, insights and a powerful network. The way to successfully offer equal access is by creating a platform that enables bias to be completely removed from underwriting decisions, and ultimately creates a fully equitable capital product.
Clearco has proven that you can scale such a product across all geographic borders and boundaries. Great businesses are founded everywhere, and they should be given the resources to grow without the need for personal credit scores, or being dependent on the whims of venture capitalists. Clearco is now taking the mission one step further and providing access to capital that is perfectly matched to its intended use case.
Typically eCommerce businesses spend most of their capital on (i) marketing and (ii) inventory. By understanding the unique traits of those types of transactions, Clearco is capable of funding them in under 20 minutes. All that matters for underwriting are the signals harvested from real time data feeds that Clearco’s models have proven to be predictive of success.
Clearco knows that becoming ubiquitous requires them to become long term, trusted partners to entrepreneurs. This means using their platform to do more than just finance marketing and inventory spend. With the unprecedented growth of eCommerce over the past several years, due to both the rising consumer adoption of digital products and COVID, Clearco has processed tens of billions of dollars of underwriting transactions through its platform. As large amounts of data are analyzed, underwriting models quickly improve and give Clearco the ability to launch more products with more velocity; products capable of deepening the level of service Clearco is providing merchants. The company plans to continue to leverage the tremendous amount of data, accrued over the last 6 years, to create a powerful underwriting engine which allows for risk categorization at the transaction level across multiple other use cases.
Our thesis is that every line item in a merchant’s P&L expense should be matched with a cost of capital financing source that matches its level of risk. Marrying access to these financial products, with accompanying data driven insights and strategic advice, is a formula for long term, global success.
We are honoured to welcome new investor Oak HC/FT to the team. We are incredibly excited to utilize the resources earned through this $100M Series C to advance this mission of empowering founders with the most attractive and equitable capital source fit for their needs. Andrew and Michele put it best: “We will be equally available to any founder in any corner of the world and we will fight equally hard for every single one of them to win.”