Hum Capital Raises Series A to Become the Go-To Fundraising Destination for Private Companies
At Hum Capital, we are on a mission to connect great companies with the right capital by putting data at the core of how fundraising decisions are made.
Just months after the public launch of our cloud-based funding platform, the Intelligent Capital Market, we are excited to announce Hum’s Series A fundraise. With this new investment, we will continue to advance toward our goal of becoming the go-to destination for companies looking to raise private institutional capital. We’re thrilled to welcome our new investors, Webb Investment Network, and thank our existing partners at Future Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Partech for coming on this journey with us as we work to enable a more efficient, transparent and data-driven approach to fundraising.
A better way to fundraise
The frenetic pace of dealmaking in 2021 and late 2020 has exposed the limitations of how capital is raised and deployed today. Frequent headlines about truncated due diligence timelines, FOMO-driven bidding wars, inflated valuations and investment analyst burnout, bring into focus how much the world of private capital would benefit from the cloud-based revolution that has come to so many other industries. These private capital trends, and our own recent experience with Hum’s fundraising, give us even greater conviction in the importance of what we are building. We have an opportunity to fundamentally rewire the way capital is allocated to the benefit of both companies and investors.
Our Intelligent Capital Market platform achieves this by doing what humans cannot: analyzing gigabytes of business data within minutes. By enabling a more efficient, data-driven fundraising process that doesn’t sacrifice the integrity of decision-making, we’re ultimately helping to put the broader economy on steadier footing by helping allocate capital on a more rational basis.
Take our own fundraise for example. While Hum’s performance speaks for itself (more on that below), our strategy is complex and our business model has not been seen before in the world of private capital. And so from the beginning we knew that finding investors who understood the scope of the opportunity we were pursuing and would provide the right type of capital to get us there, would take time. We couldn’t have asked for better investors at this stage of our business, but are determined to modernize the process for all involved.
I am not the only entrepreneur to feel this way. There is a strange dissonance to living through a time when our economy is flush with more capital than ever yet the overworked analysts who drive the funding engine are too busy to look beyond the business models they’re used to seeing. While liberating the data that tells a company’s more complete story is a critical first step, our economy has a long way to go until data-driven private markets become the norm. Nothing makes our team more fulfilled, however, than to continue working alongside our investors, customers and teammates to deliver a world where potential is not constrained by capital!
What we’ve built today
Our end goal is to become the starting point for all fundraising decisions in the private capital markets: The first and only place any private company needs to visit to get the truest sense of their value and all of the funding options, from equity to debt, available to them. We will achieve this by combining our analytics platform with a vibrant marketplace where companies can raise capital from a diverse pool of institutional investors on the best terms for their business. This also creates an environment where investors can unlock personalized deal flow from companies on the platform and investment insights that the market can’t see.
We built our technology platform with the inherent flexibility to accommodate the multitude of financing options that comprise the $7 trillion private capital markets. But the complexity of bringing this vast, fragmented ecosystem online — while delivering a dramatically more efficient process with a lower cost and more greater choice — requires a focused approach to building scale. As a former VC, I know that equity financing is the first, and often only, choice founders consider. But the way I see it, with over 1,000 investment firms providing over $1T in private credit financing, there is a tidal wave of less-dilutive financing models coming online. And so, we decided to begin in the world of non-dilutive financing. Since the start of the year, Hum has helped companies raise a collective $400M from some of the 250 private investors on our platform — sometimes in as few as 7 days, and always with more options than the companies thought they had to choose from.
Where we’re headed
2021 has been a big year of growth for Hum thus far. Not only have we launched out of stealth, we’ve also doubled our team in the last year (and we’re still hiring), and have seen strong monetization of the Intelligent Capital Market. As we approach 100 people on the team, it is humbling to watch our go-to-market operations scale to onboard new institutional investors and accelerate the product innovation needed to bring new financing options to Hum’s platform. The flywheel is spinning, a diverse investor base is paying off for companies by delivering the lowest cost, most flexible financing on the planet. As a result, more companies are coming to the Intelligent Capital Market, which in turn is delivering world class, personalized deal flow to investors on the platform. While it’s no surprise the global capital markets are the ultimate marketplace, seeing them come online is a beautiful thing and we are just getting started!
