Fintech Cape has raised more than $3m from backers including Mercury Capital principals
Fintech start-up Cape has raised $3.1m in pre-seed funding from backers including Mercury Capital’s principal partners Clark Perkins and Ben Hawter, Investible, and a bevy of angel investors including Stripe’s regional start-up lead Tom Richardson and a bunch of early Atlassian employees.
The raise values the Sydney based company at $18m, with Scalare Partners and the founder of LegalVision, Lachlan McKnight, also investing.
Cape has also secured a $30m debt facility from Aura Ventures to underpin its scale up, as it seeks to grab a share of the staff expense management sector.
Cape’s technology aims to simplify the process of employee expenses by issuing “corporate cards wrapped in software that helps companies track and control all spending’’.
This, the company says, does away with the time-consuming process of submitting end of the month expense reports with invoices attached, and with Cape providing the credit under its model, helps smooth cash flow for organisations.
READ MORE:Harold Mitchell-backed blockchain firm launches strategic review
Cape has inked a Principal Member relationship with MasterCard which allows it to keep all of the interchange fees from transactions, with Cape’s income streams to come from interchange income and software as a service-type subscriptions, rather than from credit charges and transaction fees.
Cape founder Ryan Edwards-Pritchard said it was “more like a traditional SaaS company with tiered pricing’’.
“Businesses are able to set different limits for different individuals and teams, as well as centralising all of their receipts, attaching them to each expense with integrations into cloud accounting software providers,’’ the company says.
Cape estimates there is $66bn in business to business spending it can tap into.
Mr Edwards-Pritchard said Cape could also provide significant savings on foreign exchange fees for businesses, which was increasingly important with so many now relying on SaaS providers for their business platforms.
Cape’s model is similar to that of Brex and Ramp in the US and Pleo and Payhawk in Europe, with New York-based Ramp this week hitting a $US8.1bn valuation after raising $US550m in debt and $US200m in equity.
Cape currently has a team of 18 based in Sydney and remotely across three continents and Mr Edwards-Pritchard said the funds raised would be used to build out the product suite and double its headcount “with the vast majority of capital going into hiring engineers and product specialists’’.
Jarden deal-makers sharpen their focus on lifting share
This year expect more Australian corporations to reshape their portfolios and private equity to consider floats as an investment exit option, says Jarden Group.
Debt capital markets proceeds up
Debt capital markets proceeds for Australia increased more than 16 per cent in 2024 compared to the previous year as corporates became more confident that inflation was being reined in.