Seattle’s Lighter Capital, which offers an alternative to venture capital and traditional bank loans, today announced a new $100 million fund that will be used to make 500 investments in tech startups.
Lighter Capital has helped companies such as Cloudbilt, Refer.com, Fusion Labs, Redspin and other with financing, providing an alternative to venture capital where entrepreneurs must forfeit equity.
The new fund comes from Community Investment Management and will help Lighter Capital increase its total investment per company from $1 million to $2 million.
Lighter Capital uses proprietary technology to streamline the lending process for entrepreneurs, creating what it says is a more efficient fundraising system online for raising cash — somewhat of a “Capital-as-a-Service” tool. In the past two years, it has increased its investments by 10X and now funds six companies per month.
“This makes us one of the highest volume investors of technology startups,” said Lighter Capital CEO BJ Lackland. “We raised this fund to ensure that we can continue to increase our volume of funding.”
Lighter Capital also raised a $9 million Series B round today from Voyager Capital, Summit Capital, and individual investors, including Lighter Capital Chairman and Sharebuilder Securities founder Jeff Seely. The funding will be used to double the 23-person team over the next year and improve its product.
“We have built amazing software to dramatically raise our investment volume, forever changing how entrepreneurs access growth capital,” Lackland said. “It takes capital to grow our team and continue scaling up, so in the future we can expand from funding six companies a month to 60 companies a month.”
