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Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

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Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

#1
Hi HN! We’re Jon and Matthew, the co-founders of Lendflow (https://lendflow.io). We make it easy for software companies to embed lending services into their product. It allows you to easily create your own version of Square, Shopify or Stripe Capital and offer it to your customers in-app.

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!

Re: Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

#3
Definitely see how embedded lending could be a value-add for a number of businesses! Two questions:

1. Is the main draw for your customers being able to increase customer retention over time?

2. How are applications distributed to the top lenders, on the back end? Is there an auction process?

Re: Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

#5

Interesting. I heard Immad from Mercury talk about you. Really impressed that you started this up without the "team of 10 and a few million dollars"! How did you manage it or am I misreading something?

We've been building in the space for a number of years on previous products/companies. It's been a long learning process. All in all, I'd say at least that has gone into it!

Re: Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

#6

This may be a naive question: is this a white labelled Klarna-like service?

There's definitely some areas of overlap in that we're both offering the ability to add financing to a use workflow. Some differences are that we're focused on small business while Klarna is focused on consumer. Another is that they're focused on a consumer checkout process with a buy now pay later product.

While you could certainly create that type of product on Lendflow, it's not limited to just buy now pay later. There's a much broader set of funding products you can build and user workflows you can integrate them into.

Re: Launch HN: Lendflow (YC W21) – Infrastructure for embedded lending services

#7

Definitely see how embedded lending could be a value-add for a number of businesses! Two questions: 1. Is the main draw for your customers being able to increase customer retention over time? 2. How are applications distributed to the top lenders, on the back end? Is there an auction process?

1. I think the main draw depends on the objectives of the customer. For many the priority is going to be improving retention, but for others it may be increasing revenue per user or driving adoption of another product or feature. Ultimately it all leads to higher retention, that just may not be the main draw starting out.

2. We compile data on the business as if we're underwriting them for a loan, although we never actually lend or take balance sheet risk. We use the data to place them with a batch of lenders (typically about 3) that's going to be the best fit for their risk profile and use of funds. We take the best pricing from the batch to present to the borrower. The goal is to send them to as few lenders as possible while acquiring the best pricing available on the market.

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