
Pipe Taps $60 Million Seed Extension
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior reporter, covering venture capital. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks. Follow him on Twitter.
Los Angeles-based Pipe Technologies, Inc. announced Wednesday it has raised $60 million in equity and asset financing as an extension to the $6 million seed round it closed in February.
Launched last September, Pipe enables software as a service (SaaS) companies with recurring revenues to tap into their deferred cash flows by getting a cash advance against the full annual value of software subscriptions. Trading limits on the platform range from $10,000 to several million dollars per month, depending on the size of companies.
The round was led by Fin VC with participation from new investors Tribe Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Lachy Groom and KSD Capital, and existing investors Craft Ventures, Fika Ventures, and MaC Ventures. The funding will allow Pipe to expand into new markets.
"We believe Pipe's subscription finance platform will radically transform the global SaaS business model, providing liquidity that will generate a tidal wave of growth and innovation for SaaS companies and positioning subscription contracts as a new and highly valued asset class for global investors," said Peter Ackerson, Investment Partner at Fin VC.
Also on Wednesday, Pipe unveiled its subscription financing platform and announced that Michal Cieplinski will serve as the company's chief operating officer and chief legal officer. Previously, Cieplinski served as general counsel at LendingClub, a publicly traded fintech company.
"Pipe already offers a unique value proposition to the booming SaaS industry, but the vision is much bigger than the work Pipe is doing today," Cieplinski said." We've started with reimagining funding, but ultimately want to be a larger one-stop solution for SaaS services."
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Peter Pham Is Not Afraid to Die. How One of LA's Preeminent VCs Became Obsessed with COVID
As Thanksgiving approached, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti implored residents to stay home and halt all nonessential travel as COVID-19 cases skyrocketed.
But on Thanksgiving Day, Peter Pham, one of L.A.'s most prominent early-stage investors and the co-founder of Science Inc, a Santa Monica startup studio and early-stage venture fund that manages over $100 million and recently launched a $310.5 million SPAC, posted a selfie of himself atop Las Vegas' High Roller ferris wheel.
He was clutching a can of Liquid Death, the bad boy-themed canned water brand that has improbably become Science's buzziest startup. Pham guzzles six cans a day, because he says he does not trust municipal tap water.
"I'm not afraid of dying," Pham told me recently. "There's risk for everything and COVID is a risk that I feel very confident in my ability to deal with. I could be wrong and that's OK. I am OK if I fucked up and I die from it."
On this week's episode of Office Hours, you'll hear from Gregg Renfrew, serial entrepreneur and founder of clean beauty company, Beauty Counter. She also serves on the board of directors of Supernova, my special purpose acquisition company.
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