Miguel Fernandez of Capchase discusses how his company helps recurring-revenue companies secure non-dilutive capital, having raised $90 million.
Miguel Fernandez of Capchase discusses how his company helps recurring-revenue companies secure non-dilutive capital, having raised $90 million to accelerate business growth. Capchase provides fast, flexible funding by bringing future cash flows to the present day without diluting ownership.
that one looks like you know any founder that wants to launch a business has an idea and they they just plug into cap chase and then they can just focus on building a product and shipping the product the most important piece of advice i would give myself like hey think about who you want on board way ahead when you need them hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so super excited about the guest that we have today is a someone as well from spain just like myself also also from madrid believe it or not so super super excited what he's doing uh incredible journey building scaling financing you name it uh and i guess that we're gonna be learning quite a bit today so without further ado let's welcome our guest today miguel fernandez welcome to the show hey alejandro thank you so much for having me here i'm super excited to be uh sharing our story with you and and to be talking to
a fellow spaniard madrid absolutely absolutely well lovely to have you so so miguel i would love to to start here with doing like a walk through memory lane uh and obviously born and raised in spain i mean how how was life growing up in madrid oh yeah um yeah that madrid was fine was a lot of fun i remember like i really liked growing things from the beginning which i think is probably has influenced my whole life but i remember like growing up i spent most of my time um playing lego and building stuff i never got into coding as a kid which is sad no no they use your entrepreneurial story but yeah building things mostly lego sets and then i yeah very curious about how things work so i studied engineering in madrid i did mechanical engineering and then i went over to munich where i lived for a couple of years where i did energy engineering with a focus on nuclear and then never worked as
an engineer sadly i work in consulting for a couple of years doing banking and tnt banking mostly focused on fintech which is when i first go interest into the space back in 2015 this is now memory lane for sure um i think all the rates in fintech was around b2b smb lending and then also rob advisors which i think are remarkably not hot these days uh but anyways that's when i fell in love with the space um i tried launching two companies while i was in consulting and of course we did all the mistakes that people usually do you know uh working part-time and i'm wanting to do our idea without violating the market and so on so both of course failed but we learned a lot along the way and then i really decided that i wanted to build things so i joined i left consulting i joined a pre-revenue sas company in spain um as the ninth employee roughly i think and i was the first person in sales it
was funny because when i joined the position i joined as a business development associate and based on you know all the interviews just descriptions and so on i thought i was going to be joining to this strategy and then when i got there this gave me a phone the first day and said like hey so you're gonna call call people and sell the product like dial and smile smile and smile exactly yeah so i was like obviously not happy i mean i was very you know i'm comfortable i collecting people that it worked i ended up doing the sales and customer success teams relatively quickly right and run the company very fast and then i eventually moved to the uk to london to open up the local office build a team enter the market from scratch so it was quite a ride and in those three years as we went from you know zero to a few million in arr we really got to know the sas space and the size dynamics and
how such companies grow what are the growing pains you know around fundraising cash management revenue reporting and so on that we're trying to solve right now and then yeah let that company came to my mba at hvs and spent the first few months researching a lot around working capital and cash conversion cycle for different verticals all with the idea of helping companies with a working cap and their funding needs basically helping them to either pay later or get bit earlier so they will have more cash in hand to grow and we looked at different solutions for different verticals we looked at factoring we looked at supply chain finance we looked at trade finance and we really felt that we didn't really add anything to what was in the space currently so we just kept iterating and iterating but the more we learned about the topic um the more we honed in the idea and then eventually that topic
of helping companies to get paid earlier click together with the pains that we felt operating assassin's business and we started with captchas early 2020 and since then it's been a ride right we spent the first few months speaking with a ton of founders understanding hey beyond the funding needs of a company which i mean we can get into detail on what capsules does later um we wanted to understand besides the funding what other pains around cash management and revenue management were they facing we discovered a million pains we decided to focus on financing so helping companies helping most of all retail revenue companies to offer flexible payment terms to customers so paying monthly payments quarterly payments but giving them all the cash up fronts so they would have all that cash to reinvest in growth instead of waiting for it to come in and then we raised around over the summer from
you know some of the best seed investors so max left in co-founder of paypal and co-founder of a firm um then blink capital caffeinated capital so first investors in palancia lyft um earth table docker and so on and yeah one left at the end of august and since then he's been crazy like crazy growth but but before we talk about the crazy growth and the crazy stuff why don't we talk about the crazy conversation that you had with your parents when you told them that you were dropping out from harvard business school i mean you know coming from madrid all the way to boston doing the masters i mean that's like a like a big big break like a big you know thing you know especially when you're coming from all the way from spain and then you know after accomplishing all of that you have to make the phone call and say hey mom dad i'm i'm i'm finished here you know i'm launching a startup i mean how
is that conversation like yeah wow that felt very crazy as well right so i think i think you nailed it right you're coming from madrid like when you see harvard in the television the newspaper as a kid like it's like a dream right like you just want to go there and that was my dream i i never thought it would be possible to go to hbs and then i finally got in and i was so happy i remember the day they called me my knees were shaking right so it was like to me was like my biggest accomplishment so far so then i came here it was amazing like all the doors that it opened and the vision that it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy right like you're here and you're thinking okay everybody that comes to this you guys gonna be amazing and then you have to be amazing like the pressure is on to something great so um it was really good for me i think that this would have been possible without
going to hbs spoke with a ton of professors he'd open a ton of doors and then we launched captchas over the summer of our first year i originally thought that i could do both things at the same time um i needed to stay enrolled for one more semester while i got my o1 visa because if i had dropped out earlier i would have had to you know go back to spain and doing code it was a bit of a mess so i stayed in a role trying to do both things but i would just find myself you know like not being able to go to class and just like focusing 100 on the company and it was a really tough decision to drop out or not but what i was thinking is what would i rather drop out of right hbs and focus on capsize or drop out of capsize and focus on hps and the opportunity was just so huge in capsules that i couldn't say no to it so then i called my mom and said hey you know what i've been doing this past few
months i haven't been able to spend time at hbs so i'm thinking of taking a break you know and see sea capsules through and and then eventually i could come back in the future or who knows right so so yeah so then so then obviously you here make the decision of dropping out you have your your group of co-founders which actually you know from from the business that you used to work at before doing the masters uh and then you guys get together and and what were the early days like i mean obviously about you launched this thing in 2020 right before you know the world you know uh was going down the toilet so uh so i mean how was that for you i mean did you did you at any point think oh man i think i may have made a mistake you know dropping out of harvard i think that yeah there are ups and downs right in in startup life um but yeah in our case like it was just a flurry right like you know…