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Los Angeles-based startup FastPay, which specializes in lending funds to digital media startups, announced Wednesday it has received $15 million in funding from Oak HC/FT, a growth-equity fund that invests in health care and financial technology companies.
Founder and CEO of FastPay Jed Simon said the funds will be used to build out the sales, credit and tech teams of FastPay, as well as improving their technical platform IGNITE. According to Simon, reaching the fundraising goal was only half the battle. The team also wanted to make sure they found an investor that aligned with FastPay’s goals and principles.
“We really nailed that with Oak HC/FT, they're terrific people and really understand our business,” Simon said.
“FastPay is the innovator and market leader in invoice financing and payable automation for global media,” said Oak HC/FT General Partner Patricia Kemp in a statement. “Our decision to invest in FastPay was driven by the strength and vision of its management team, as well as their track record and deep industry expertise.”
FastPay, which has a second location in New York, is a collection of finance, entertainment, legal, media, technology, and design professionals who work to provide flexible financing options to clients. With an outdated payment system that tends to be very time consuming and is heavily reliant on paper-based invoices, media companies spend more time on paperwork than growth and strategy, Simon said. FastPay helps to improve this current pain point among publishers.
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“We can take a payment with a 120-day wait time and cut it down to about 5 days,” Simon said. “We help publishers invoice and reconcile their invoices for the agencies and we accelerate the payments and finance them.”
Since its inception in 2009, FastPay has financed nearly $500 million in loans for about 25,000 invoices to hundreds of companies. Simon said the decision to look for new investors was an easy one with the recent surges in the advertising industry, which has accelerated toward programmatic buying for all types of media.
“The opportunity to become the definitive financial utility powering the financial side of the transactions was too appealing to ignore,” he said. “We decided to raise capital to capitalize on the opportunity.”
