Introducing Slate
Capital, inside the software small businesses already use. Here is what we are building and why we think it has to work this way.
A small business needs money on a specific day. Not this quarter, not in principle. On the Tuesday the van breaks, the week before the season starts, the Friday payroll is short.
Getting it on that day is almost impossible. The process takes three weeks, starts with a form, and is decided by somebody who has never seen the business operate. By the time an answer arrives, the moment it was for has passed.
Meanwhile the software that business runs on every day, the platform that pays them, books them, or staffs them, already knows the answer. It has watched them work for two years.
That gap is the whole company.
What Slate does
We put capital inside the platform's own product, sized from the data that platform already holds, offered at the moment it is useful.
The platform keeps everything a platform should keep: the brand, the surface, the relationship, the decision about who ever sees an offer. Their customers never learn our name.
We take the parts nobody wants: the offer intelligence, the underwriting, the money, the payments and reconciliation, the support and collections, and the compliance. Every advance is funded in full through facilities we manage, so it never touches the platform's balance sheet, and we carry the loss if one goes bad.
Why it has to be embedded
Because timing is the product.
An offer a week early is junk. An offer a week late is useless. On the day, in the tool they already have open, it is the most useful thing in the software.
Only the platform can hit that day, because only the platform can see it coming. A bank cannot, a broker cannot, and an advert certainly cannot.
Why now
Three things arrived at once. Platforms became the system of record for entire industries. The data those platforms hold turned out to be a better credit signal than a bank statement. And the infrastructure to move money became something you can integrate rather than become.
What is missing is the layer in between: the thing that reads the data, decides, funds, services, and takes the risk, without asking the platform to become a lender.
That is what we are building.
Where we are
Early, deliberately. We would rather have a small number of platforms live and working than a long list of logos. If you run a platform that watches money move, we will show you what your book looks like before you write a line of code.
In the press
BetaKit wrote about what we are building and why we are starting in Canada: The startup bringing a piece of America's FinTech stack to Canada.
