Announcing Lendtable’s $3 million Seed Raise

When I wrote Introducing Lendtable 4 months ago, it was to announce our commitment to building a solution to the liquidity problem hampering long-term savings and investment. I highlighted how debilitating a lack of savings can be and that the problem is not a lack of desire to save — but a lack of disposable income to do so. Since then, the whole Lendtable team has been ideating, building, and hustling. Over this time we:

• Have significantly grown our core business. In three months, we’ve helped our users save an additional $100k+ for their retirement
• Built our first web servicing experience which allows us to quickly collect customer info from start to finish without ever having to hop on a call
• Identified key ancillary products to add to our core service (e.g. pre-paid cards as an alternative channel for our users to receive their Lendtable Cash and our free Lendtable Checklist for folks to get an idea of what “next step” they should take for their finances. Thousands of people have already used this service.)
• Launched the Lendtable Blog to establish ourselves as a thought leader in the wealth-building/retirement space
• Graduated from the Summer 2020 Class of Y Combinator and pulled together a cohesive vision for the bright future of Lendtable

While there is a ton more product work required to make Lendtable’s vision a reality, we have set up a strong foundation by removing the barriers for users to sign up and diversifying customer payment channels to create a seamless experience. In addition to hard work, a key need for us to fuel our rapid expansion is capital. Without it, our speed to grow and build great products will be significantly hampered. Sheridan has tirelessly been on the fundraising trail, making sure we secure the funding needed to take Lendtable to thousands more users. With all this being said:

We are excited to announce that we have recently closed our successful $3 million seed raise, bringing our total funding to $4.5 million.

Our Investors

We are grateful and excited for the support and partnership from great firms like Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, SoftBank Group, Streamlined Ventures, Valia Ventures, Socii Capital, Partech Ventures and Green Visor Capital. We are also thrilled to have the support of a diverse group of angels such as Dennis Woodside (President of Impossible Foods), Michael Vaughan (former COO of Venmo), Steve Sarowitz (Founder of Paylocity and Blue Marble Payroll), Joshua Browder (Founder and CEO of DoNotPay) and Michael Gruen/Bryce Hall/Josh Richards/Griffin Johnson (TikTok entrepreneurs of Sway House). They will undoubtedly help us grow in key areas such as marketing, branding, operations, and product.

We also want to shout out some of the folks who bet on us very early, as their capital and expertise helped us push forward to this point. Ramnik Arora and Lingtong Sun of Toy Ventures are remarkable, founder-first investors who from our earliest days saw the potential in what we were building given their unique insights as product operators at Facebook. Sean Milmoe and the team at BTGrowth Capital similarly recognized the large problem we were tackling and immediately provided us with their finance and capital markets expertise. Zach Noorani and the team at Foundation Capital made their investment at the peak of uncertainty during the pandemic, truly showing us their commitment through the good times…. and the bad times. Foundation Capital was our first backing from an institutional VC and they’ve been instrumental to our growth. Finally, Andy Bromberg and Ryan Breslow have been excellent advisors to us. They take every call (even from Sheridan, who is getting close to 15+ calls a month by this point) without hesitation and have formed valuable connections for us in so many ways.

To every single one of our investors who bet on us, it means a great deal. We are incredibly grateful to have each and every one of you on the team and we can’t wait to build together.

Lendtable’s Goals

With a $3 million seed raise and our phenomenal partners, we are equipped to prove that you can build a great business, while truly helping non-high-net-worth individuals save and invest. Our core focus is to continue growing our user base and prove that the economics of our business work as we scale. Additionally, we look to continue building strong partnerships with employers, advisors, and businesses that are aligned with us in helping employees get the most out of their paycheck.

Our fundraise will allow us to achieve our goals by hiring a world-class team that is just as obsessed with the savings liquidity problem as we are, investing in building technology that gives us an upper hand in the form of underwriting, distribution and servicing, and establishing the Lendtable brand into a household name our users trust.

Amidst rising income inequality exacerbated by the global pandemic gripping our country, we believe Lendtable’s mission is so important.

COVID-19 has crippled Americans across race and gender lines and the end of stimulus checks in July left even more Americans vulnerable. We have heard countless stories from our users about the unfortunate reality of COVID-19. Many of them have had their hours cut during the pandemic, resulting in a shift of more income towards day-to-day expenses and less towards long-term savings. There is a reinvigorated push for equity for people of color and specifically for Black folks across the board due to the progress of Black Lives Matter. Economic equity must be a focus area, as the wealth gap between Black and white Americans continues to widen during the pandemic: the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies estimates that 53% of Black households experienced a decline in employment income during the pandemic compared to 39% of white households.

As a Black founder from the Rust Belt, I know these problems to be true firsthand and that they have existed decades before the unfortunate events of this year. I have seen my community struggle with financial insecurity acutely and I am inspired by the current national spotlight on these issues. Sheridan and I are as motivated as ever to scale the first fintech company that truly helps Americans of all backgrounds get the most out of their paycheck.

We look forward to sharing our updates with all of you, with even more progress to come.

About Lendtable

Lendtable is a young startup company set to solve the long term savings and liquidity problem. Each year $24 billion in employer 401(k) matches are left on the table, primarily because employees cannot afford to both save for the long term and pay for daily expenses. Lendtable helps employees unlock this portion of their paycheck by supplying them the funds they need to receive their full 401(k) match from their employer. With Lendtable, they no longer need to choose between saving for retirement and covering day-to-day expenses.

Lendtable Cash can help employees save thousands more per year (and tens to hundreds of thousands over their career) by simply taking advantage of the entirety of their employee benefits. In the future, Lendtable looks to create solutions across an employers benefits suite that help employees understand and access the full potential of their paycheck.

Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, the company is led by founders Mitchell Jones and Sheridan Clayborne. Mitchell previously founded Parable, an automated personal financial assistant fintech startup. Before Parable, he worked as a fintech product manager at Facebook leading their digital wallet product for LATAM and at Dropbox in cybersecurity. Mitchell graduated from Yale University. Sheridan was the youngest Black American to get into Northwestern age 15, and he went on to work at Goldman Sachs in Private Equity and Dropbox as a machine learning product manager. Sheridan has built multiple fintech startups and has done over $20 million in sales through these ventures.

For press or media inquiries, please contact:

Mitchell Jones: mitchell@lendtable.com

Sheridan Clayborne: sheridan@lendtable.com