SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Miami Based Fintech did $70m in 2023 Revenue - What about Gross Margin?
21 Mar 2024
Chapter 1: What is FunKite and what services does it offer?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. FunKite was launched back in 2015 on a dream and an idea.
They've scaled nicely today in a capital efficient way. They put out or they generated, they get 5,000 applications per month. They sent out offers about 1,300 of those. Some portion of those are accepted and approved. The business in 2023 did quote about 70 million bucks of revenue. Alex is constantly thinking about how do they keep their
both default rate low, which is 16%, if I'm remembering properly, and then actual charge off loss rate, 6.8% of that. Those are good economics. They optimize for about a 16% take rate NIM sort of all in, which is very healthy. 91 folks full-time on the team. They're funding these deals with prom notes on their own balance sheet, and then also sourcing some of them out to capital partners as well.
Hey folks, my guest is Alex Schwartz. He's the CEO of FunKite, one of the fastest growing FinTech companies in New York that provides funding to small businesses across the US. The company was founded in 2015 and his company utilizes a boutique funding style offering business owners a flexible variety of products and services that can be tailored to fit their individual needs.
Before FunKite, he engineered and sold proprietary technology to the greater FinTech industry. Alex, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. Give me your, just to get us all in the right frame, right off the bat, give us your sweet spot deal. Is it a hundred thousand bucks into a small business doing a million a year in revenue?
So our average deal size is about $110,000. And these are companies that are doing between one and 5 million a year in annual growth sales.
Okay. And any specific sector, e-com, restaurants?
Very broad. Everything from restaurants to e-com to medical. There's some industries that we don't cater to at the moment. Like what? Like transportation and trucking. They're really in trouble. Those guys are really having a big hard time right now. getting by. We don't do bail bondsman. So truckers, transportation, and we've pulled back a little bit on the construction industry.
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Chapter 2: How does FunKite manage default and charge-off rates?
Is that you're going to get back to 100?
There is no term. Until we collect all of our receivables, there is no term.
But Alex, for you, what's typical though, right? So if you're taking 10% of monthly receivables, do you typically get paid back on the receivables you purchased within five months or do you model for 12 months or 15?
No, I mean, we model anywhere from eight to 16 months, but it's very unpredictable, right? So there is no term. There is no fixed term with our product. We're taking a ride with the merchant at, you know, Look, we look at historical data and we hope that business is going to increase and sales are going to go up, but it's really hard to predict that. So having said that, why trucking?
So we've seen a lot of transportation companies fail. The biggest problem they have is accounting for the cost of goods, which in their case might be fuel, right? So fuel is jumping up and down. They're booking the jobs at one rate. They're not getting paid fast enough. So they're having a hard time. And this has been going on for years.
We see a lot of major transportation companies file bankruptcy in the last two years. But construction, so we're seeing a delay in payments. They're having a hard time collecting money. A lot of projects went into standstill. So when interest rates went up, a lot of the commercial properties are in trouble. We see a lot of big developers in trouble right now. They can't refinance.
So that's slowed down. The residential market still seems to be doing good, but not as good as it was, you know, immediately post COVID. Right.
And Alex, in fact, during a key component you have to model is obviously the discount rate. The 100K example you just gave us where you wire 90K up front would represent a 10% discount of future receivables. Is that your target typically?
Typically, it can range from anywhere from 10% to about 28% discount. So depending on the risk factors that we're facing.
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Chapter 3: What is the average deal size and target market for FunKite?
Who's buying the product? How credit worthy are they? So that's a little and there's usually they're very short term type of deals. Right. With us, we're buying receivables. We don't know if they're going to have. So we're looking at, let's say, a restaurant. We look at 12 months of receivables. They're averaging one hundred thousand dollars a month in sales.
And that's how we're going to calculate our offer. But what happens if their sales go down? It's a hurricane. It's COVID. There is no guarantee that they're going to have receivables. So because we reconcile their sales constantly, right? So we do reconciliation. So if we're supposed to take 10%, we're looking at their sales or we're adjusting payments.
Most of the time, it never works out as planned. It's always a slower pace, okay? So there is no fixed term here. And it's very hard. Look, we have disclosures in states like California and states like New York, where at the time of origination, we have to provide an APR, right? And we do calculate this APR based on the standards that they have provided, but it's not always accurate.
And it will change. It will change because what if it takes them two years or three years, right? So the better way to look at this is the cost of capital. So, you know, I'm getting $90,000. I got to pay back $100,000. My cost of capital is $10,000. That's the true way to look at this. And, um, cause there is no term and, and, and, and that's really, really important. Right.
So my audience will understand this. They're, they're sort of savvy find.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges FunKite faces in the trucking and construction industries?
They'll understand this completely, but I just want to underscore paying back that 10 K cost of capital in three months. If the company grows really fast and receivables grows really fast, it's very different than paying back 10 K over someone that delays their payments. And it takes three years.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And we're not catering to your bankable client, right?
We're not banking. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. It's a restaurant. I guess my question to you though, is the example we just gave is if you do a deal with a restaurant for 110K, your average deal size, and then they explode, right? They do really well. That's good for you. That's great. You're going to get your money back quicker, but it drives the effective.
Like if they're backing into an effective rate, it drives it through the roof. Why do you, do you ever restructure those to keep your good customers coming back for more?
No, we don't restructure them. And I've never seen it explode in a way where they just pay back like that. However, if a merchant comes back in 30 days and says, look, I just want to repay the receivables now, we just give them a discount on the balance.
So instead of like the 10K, you might say you're paying back early, you can pay a 6K.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does revenue-based finance work in FunKite's model?
Yeah, we discounted and that's great, right? I see. But it never explodes in the way we want it to explode.
Yeah, it's always the worst case.
It's the implosion, not the explosion, right?
Yeah. Help me understand on a month. Let's just use last month, February. How many new deals did you do across how many companies?
Okay, so we processed last month, probably approximately 5000 applications for different businesses, right? We don't disclose the numbers of deals we actually fund or the volume, we can give you just average numbers, right?
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Chapter 6: How does FunKite determine its cost of capital?
Um, but so yeah, 5,000 businesses, about 5,000 applications. We processed a variety of industries. Like there's, we get some time, agriculture, supermarkets, restaurants, um, manufacturers. It's just to, you name it, we see it.
I mean, can you give me, I don't want to push you on something you don't want to disclose, but can you at least sort of put us in the right range, right? So if you have 5,000 applicants, are you doing sort of on the range of 1,000 new wires per month into these companies? Or can you give me an infinite range?
Nobody does that type of conversion. No. So it's much lower. Yeah, it's much lower. It could be anywhere from... So I'll give you this number. Out of 5,000 applicants, we made offers to merchants. About 27% of those applicants, we made funding offers.
Okay. Okay. Got it. So about 1,300 you made offers to, and then some portion of the... Why would someone not accept your offer?
Yeah. they might get a better deal from a competitor, better terms. Like who? Like who? There's On Deck, there's Shopify, there's PayPal. There's a lot of big competitors in the space, right?
You can be with Lending Club.
So Lending Club is really not a funder. A lot of them are like kind of lead gen. So they're gathering, they're telling you they're doing it, and then they send it out. But Lending Club is not really a business funding. They do it more personal stuff, consumer-based, right? I see.
And just to be clear, you're not lead gen, right? You have your own source of capital.
We're absolutely a full fintech in this space. Our own underwriting, legal, collections, sales, we do everything.
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