Coming out of stealth today, I’m building Sugar (@usesugar) which solves fintech’s biggest pain point: liquidity for pre-funding and reserves. Fintech’s biggest secret is: in order for customers to move money, the fintech they use needs to pre-fund payments so that their payments go through. Sugar solves that pain by providing liquidity in an API, or as a line of credit in USD, USDC, USDT. Some popular cases we help solve in fiat and stables: - Pre funding payments on/off chain - Collateral requirements and escrow - Sponsor bank requirements - Credit reserves The problem: While most SMB segments are well served for credit, fintechs are deeply underserved as there isn’t a credit product designed for fintech’s pre-funding and reserve capital needs, because they did not exist at this scale until a few years ago. Sugar helps finance those fintechs so that they can scale their payments or credit business, while diluting less and not having to face delays in growth or interruptions of service. Sugar doesn’t require you to change your payment processor, bank sponsor, payout provider, or on/off ramp infrastructure. We want to unlock your liquidity to help increase scale. How do we do it: volume based underwriting. We’ve pioneered what we call Volume Based Underwriting, where we underwrite fintechs based on their volumes enabling us to understand a fintech’s growth, volatility, and fraud in order to offer them liquidity. Why now. Fintech's first two waves. - Wave one moved banking online through mobile and desktop apps, digital KYC, and payments. The neobanks launching in 2026 still do the same. - Wave two is payments plus credit. Neobanks have to differentiate, and credit is how the hundreds launching today will win customers. - All of them will need liquidity for pre-funding, reserves, collateral, and warehouse lending. We want to be that lender. Our master plan: - Customer experience: Make getting liquidity an easy experience for fintechs. Who provides the best experience wins. - Cost of capital: Develop a loan book and re-finance with each balance sheet milestone with lower cost lenders, from banks, M&A, and DeFi. The lowest cost of capital wins. - Going vertical: Launch verticals that compliment and strengthen the core credit thesis. Rinse and repeat. If you’re a fintech founder, CFO, or someone in finance and you’re looking to solve your pre-funding or reserve needs, send me a DM. Thanks to the team at @WhiteStarCap and @alliance for supporting us early in our journey. PS, For friends that knew of us before today, we are rebranding away from Superbank.

Fireplace is happy to announce that we've raised $1.5M to build the smartest trading terminal for prediction markets. 🧵

We’re proud to announce that @tether has made a strategic investment into @hodlwithLedn, to expand our lead in bitcoin-backed loans. The investment brings together the largest stablecoin company in the world with the leading consumer bitcoin-backed lender in the world. 1/8

we're excited to announce FALCON's $1.5M pre-seed round co-led by @BDC_Capital , @MaRSIAF and @WhiteStarCap along with backing from operators, angels, friend and family we started FALCON in canada and it's been incredible to work on the future of design with support from home

.@WhiteStarCap has launched a new $50M USD seed fund with a first close of $25M. The global #VC aims to fill a key gap in Canada’s VC market by leading pre-seed and seed rounds for #CDNtech startups. I sat down with the folks behind it to unpack the news. betakit.com/white-star-capit…

We are thrilled to share Mapping Digital Assets in Institutional Portfolios, built from discussions with allocators and fund managers. The report pinpoints where strategies slot into the sleeves committees already track. 👉 Access the full report here: cryptoinsightsgroup.com/insi…

Big news today: Plastic raised a $5.35M pre-seed to solve personal identity for AI, led by @variantfund, @WhiteStarCap, & @betaworks. *And* we're launching early access to @honchodotdev's hosted platform starting right now! Welcome to the era of individually aligned agents.

We’re proud to announce USD 30M in Series B funding, led by @Base10 with support from @Inovia, @WhiteStarCap, and Fonds de solidarité FTQ. This milestone fuels our mission to lead in Threat Exposure Management. #Cybersecurity #SeriesB #ThreatIntelligence

In a new report by @TeamPOSA, @khushii_w, @pumpernikhil, and Jane Khodarkovsky explore the policy and legal implications of inclusion lists—an important mechanism designed to enhance Ethereum's censorship resistance. Read on for an overview ⬇️

Introducing Predicate. For the first time, transaction prerequisites can be defined and owned by developers and communities without compromising on decentralization. We are thrilled to announce a total fundraise of $7M to bring this vision to life. ⬇️

Something coming...

EXCLUSIVE: Microsoft-backed @spaceandtime raises $20 million to merge AI and blockchain. trib.al/Bb8MY4q

Super exciting to welcome @spaceandtime to our Digital Asset Fund. The team are delivering verifiable compute at scale, at a time when doing so has never been more important! Check out our latest blog on why we invested: whitestarcapital.medium.com/…

We are thrilled to announce that Space and Time Labs has secured a $20M Series A, bringing our total funding to $50 million. 🚀⏳ SxT is empowering the community to own their future in an AI-powered world by providing the tools they need to build sophisticated, data-driven applications, tokenize them onchain, and win in the AI economy. Generate a new world with Space and Time, secured by our sub-second ZK coprocessor. Exclusive by @FortuneMagazine: fortune.com/crypto/2024/08/2…

Bonds are the basis for all financial products of the modern world....apart from blockchain-based products. @etherfuse is changing this by bringing stablebonds to the DeFi space. Have a read about why we invested in our latest blog by @SepAlavi! medium.com/venture-beyond/br…

Crypto payment startup Kulipa partners with Mastercard and Argent on debit card theblock.co/post/304287/cryp…

The future of Modular Oracles: why we invested in RedStone Oracles’ $15m Series A link.medium.com/Mm2NiD4GYKb

We're thrilled to be backing @redstone_defi as the team continues to innovate in the decentralized oracle space! Read more about the $15m Series A below 👇

RedStone is excited to announce a $15M Series A fundraising round, led by @Arrington_Cap to expand its Modular Oracle product ♦️🧵

The @_Fortunafi RWA Index presale is now 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 📢 Early depositors will 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐏𝐑𝐓𝐬