Sanlo, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides small to medium-sized recreation and app corporations entry to instruments to handle their funds and capital to gas their progress, has raised $10 million in Sequence A funding led by Konvoy.
The startup was based in 2020 by CEO Olya Caliujnaia and CTO William Liu, who each have backgrounds in fintech and gaming. Sanlo affords companies entry to expertise, instruments and insights that intention to assist them obtain scalable progress. When Sanlo determines that the enterprise may gain advantage from the deployment of capital, the startup assists by providing financing. Sanlo notes that it’s not a VC fund that takes fairness in trade for funding or a lender that prices compounding curiosity. The quantity of financing offered varies, but it surely’s non-dilutive capital, which signifies that Sanlo takes no possession stake within the corporations it funds.
Caliujnaia advised TechCrunch in an interview that one of many methods Sanlo differs from different fintech corporations is its concentrate on gaming and app builders. She famous that though there are different corporations specializing in different verticals in e-commerce or SAAS, Sanlo is targeted on gaming and client apps.
“We’re a expertise firm, not a fund,” Caliujnaia mentioned. “That enables us to maneuver shortly and be clear about how we work and the way we arrive on the merchandise that we construct and supply to clients. We’re additionally constructing a full stack of merchandise, it’s not nearly progress capital. Builders produce other choices through publishers, VCs and banks, however these often contain advanced and prolonged processes.”
To get began, Sanlo asks corporations for sure sorts of knowledge, together with product knowledge about how effectively the app or recreation monetizes. Sanlo additionally will get details about buyer acquisition and retention, in addition to advertising knowledge and a subset of monetary knowledge. Its predictive algorithms then regularly monitor the corporate’s progress trajectory to floor insights to determine the place and the way the enterprise can develop. Sanlo then offers corporations with entry to capital.
Picture Credit: Sanlo
As for the brand new funding, Caliujnaia mentioned Sanlo will use the cash to create extra merchandise for builders and to convey on extra folks to develop its 15-person staff.
“The plan is to construct out extra merchandise and to construct out the staff,” Caliujnaia mentioned. “We’re in search of passionate folks to assist us construct higher and sooner. We’re working with folks primarily in North America at this level, however we’re open to gifted folks somewhere else around the globe.”
The funding spherical included participation from present traders, together with Preliminary Capital, Portage Ventures, XYZ Enterprise Capital, London Enterprise Companions and Index Ventures. The funding spherical additionally included participation from new traders, together with Fin Capital, GFR Fund and quite a few angel traders. Sanlo’s Sequence A funding comes a yr after it announced $3.5 million in seed funding co-led by Index Ventures and Preliminary Capital.
As a part of the funding announcement, Sanlo additionally revealed that it has partnered with HCG Funds to broaden its pool of capital to $200 million to offer funding to the builders it really works with.
Sanlo has spent the previous 12 months onboarding choose builders and is at present working with dozens of corporations. Caliujnaia mentioned the corporate fastidiously selects companies to work with and commonly checks in with them to permit for shut collaboration. In a single occasion, Sanlo says it helped a big recreation writer that was seeking to consolidate and acquire visibility into money flows from a number of platforms. The corporate has additionally helped a subscription client app developer that wished further monetary bandwidth to convey economic system designers on board to tighten monetization. In one other case, Sanlo helped one other recreation developer that was in search of predictable non-dilutive capital to finance the event of their increasing portfolio of video games.
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