A tech company that helps SMEs to get funding from rich investors has received a massive warehouse facility from Goldman Sachs that could see them grow rapidly within the small business space.
Timelio, founded by Melbourne husband and wife team Charlotte and Andrew Petris, have been a fixture on the SME fintech scene for several years, and hope that this cash injection will help them to go to the next level.
“I started the business with my husband Andrew in 2015, so we’re coming up to 6 years,” said Charlotte Petris. “We started it as a marketplace, and were able to come to market quite quickly and offer really flexible products to businesses because of our funding model.”
“We met high net worth investors with businesses on our platform, and that worked really well for six years or so. As you can imagine, our business has changed significantly over six years and so our funding model has had to evolve.”
“That’s where this announcement comes in. In this period, we’ve grown our investor funds and launched our own fund, called the Timelio Capital Fund, in 2017, to help us scale.”
“This transition now means that Goldman Sachs is providing us with a warehouse facility up to $270m, which enables us to have access to lower-cost funding to really aggressively grow into this market.”
With this funding, Timelio can scale, but according to Petris, will do so in a way that remains true to their first purpose.
“What can inhibit fintechs is not having the solutions via funding,” she said.
“It’s really important to me with that all of the investors that invested in the platform and have been funding businesses over the last six years, we’ve been able to offer them a position in the Timelio Capital Fund that rolls into this Goldman Sachs structure, so they’re still having exposure to this asset class.”
“They’ve been very loyal to us so I’m really pleased that we’re able to keep working with them, which is not always typical in these funding structures.”
