Venture debt

Venture debt or venture lending or "venture leasing" is a type of debt financing provided to venture-backed companies by specialized banks or non-bank lenders to fund working capital or capital expenses, such as purchasing equipment. Venture debt can compliment venture capital and provide value to fast growing companies and their investors. Unlike traditional bank lending, venture debt is available to startups and growth companies that do not have positive cash flows or significant assets to use as collateral. Venture debt providers combine their loans with warrants, or rights to purchase equity, to compensate for the higher risk of default.

Venture debt can be a source of capital for entrepreneurial companies. As a complement to equity financing, venture debt provides growth capital to extend the cash runway of a startup company to achieve the next milestone while minimizing equity dilution for both employees and investors.

Venture debt is typically structured as one of three types:

Venture lenders frequently piggyback on the due diligence done by the venture capital firm.

While there are over 100 active venture debt providers, they are typically classified into two categories:

1. Commercial banks with venture-lending arms.

These banks typically accept deposits from the startup companies, and offer venture debt to complement their overall service offerings. Venture debt is usually not bread and butter for these providers. Debt lines from the banks start as low as $100,000 and for appropriately backed and/or companies with scale, can reach into the tens of millions in terms of facility sizes. Some players in this category are:

2. Specialty finance firms ("venture debt shops")

Commercial banks at times can be limited in the dollar size of the loans, or strict covenants attached. The venture debt firms typically provide higher dollar size and more flexible loan terms. Some prominent ones are:

3. Industry Dynamics

As a rule of thumb, the size of venture debt investment in a company is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of venture capital (equity). The VC industry invested around $27B in the last 12 months. This would imply around $9B potential debt market. However, not all VC-backed companies receive venture debt, and a study has recently estimated that lenders provide one venture debt dollar for every seven venture capital dollar invested. This implies around $3.9B debt market. There are several philosophies behind the various players. As a rule, they all prefer better branded VCs backing any potential portfolio company - some are more militant about this than others. They universally will provide capital to companies still in a money loss mode, with variances around comfort on timelines to breakeven, next round of capital, recently raised equity, etc.

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