Happy Sunday, everyone. We came out this week with our announcement that we’ve raised $115M to accelerate and scale our RBF investing, so I want to just share a little about that. It was really gratifying to announce the outcome of the work our team has put in over the past several months and to share a little about our progress. It’s important to recognize that this is just the beginning - there’s a lot of work and a lot of building ahead!

I’ve shared this with some of you, but I haven’t talked broadly about what we’re building. It’s bigger than what we initially set out to accomplish. Most of you know that when Carlos and I first started Novel in 2017 – back when only a few folks understood what RBF or alternative capital really was – we thought building successive funds would be the way to go. My background in VC was probably a constraint on our thinking, i.e., I knew how to build that structure, and so that’s how I approached building a funding platform. So that’s what we did. (I will say that one of our early investors, a family office, did suggest to us that we scrap the fund concept and build an opco with an attached debt facility to fund our deals. We had commitments to that initial fund by then, though, had called capital that we had deployed into a couple of deals, and it would have been difficult to unwind those or roll them into a completely different structure, so we nodded our heads, agreed that it was a good idea, but decided to stay the course.) 

Over time, as the market opened up and as entrepreneurs became more aware of alternative capital models like ours, it became clear to us that the opportunity was much, much larger than we thought it was initially. It also became clear to us based on what we were learning and how our portfolio was performing that we could build a very successful fund franchise. It would take a long time, but it was completely doable. But the market was opening up so fast that we recognized that we also had an opportunity to pivot, to take that opco suggestion from a few years ago and build something different. Something bigger, faster, better capitalized, with more capital to deploy, and something much more impactful. Something that aligned with our fundamental belief that entrepreneurs need capital and resources to get to their promised land, whatever that is for them. So we decided to take what we’d learned in our first fund and launch a fintech platform that really allowed us to have as big an impact as possible. And that’s what we’re doing now.

In fact, now that we raised this capital, we are building (and launching) our online platform so that we can support entrepreneurs in the way that they need and at the scale that we want. I should take the opportunity to say out loud that I think we are building something really special. I’m not very good at that; I move from one "win" to the next body of work without celebrating. So this is my celebration, and I’m excited to share more about our journey with you all as we go.

Important Note:
I want to share that the debt we raised was from none other than Jacob Haar and the team at Community Investment Management, who will be joining me for a Speaker Series conversation this week. You can register here. Jacob and his team were amazing to work with, and we were fortunate to learn a lot from them along the way. I’d recommend working with them to anyone doing what we do.