Happy Sunday friends (and happy father’s day as well)! I want to provide you all one final opportunity to participate in the RBFN survey about how the economy is affecting your business. Go here to share your thoughts on how the economy will impact our growing space. Several of you have shared great insights so far, and I’d love to get some additional feedback to share with the community!

This week I wanted to highlight another way in which our space is changing: acquisitions are becoming a more regular occurrence. There were two acquisitions in our world recently that I found interesting. First, Uncapped, the rapidly growing RBF firm based in the UK acquired Sugar in a bid to enter the gaming and apps market. Sugar is a specialty finance lender focused on game and app developers, so this appears to bolt on a meaningful capability for Uncapped. (Sugar reminds me of our friend Martin MacMillan at Pollen.VC who did a Speaker Series with us recently. Check that out here.) This acquisition follows Pipe’s acquisition of Purely Capital back in February, which brought their funding platform in the media and entertainment space. I think we’ll continue to see more of these kinds of bolt-on acquisitions as niche players are absorbed by well capitalized noisemakers.

There is a second category of acquisition that I think we’ll see more of as well: As the funding market continues to evolve and more players want to enter, companies in adjacent markets and who have complementary technology and expertise will pursue acquisitions in this space, making the bet that they know something about a certain kind of company or customer that will give them an edge in the funding marketplace. (They probably don’t know how hard it is to sell money.) A recent example is Business Warrior, which started as a dashboard and analytics platform helping startups identify and solve their growth challenges, picked up Alchemy Technologies, a digital lending platform that can be white labeled and applied to several verticals. The combined company will offer an analytics dashboard and multiple kinds of funding to qualified companies, and again, the implied bet is that Business Warrior’s analytics gives the company an edge in finding and funding lower-risk companies. 

Stay tuned. This is going to happen more…