Host: Guillaume De Dorlodot
Guest: Dimitry Gershenson | Founder & CEO | Enduring Planet
Category: 💸 Funding | Growth Capital
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[5:29] “Enduring Planet is a fintech lender focused exclusively on the new climate economy. So we provide fast, simple, and founder friendly capital to climate entrepreneurs, big and small. We lend to startups and SMBs currently through a product called revenue based financing. So no collateral, no personal guarantees, no dilution. Apply in 10 minutes, get a term sheet in a week, get funded in 30 days.”
[15:12] “Time and time again, I would see the same thing, which is that in this universe […] where the planet is basically on fire and we have no time, we're still f*cking around with sort of the traditional model of investing. There's a lot of classic debt, which is for late stage companies with collateral requirements, personal guarantees, all sorts of complexity, nine month underwriting process, you name it. And then on the other side of the market, you have VC. And there's grants and there's project finance. But if you look at corporate finance, there's this big empty hole, where people aren't really innovating, they're not really driving change. And in a world where we need to hit, call it four or five, some people say 10 trillion a year of investing, and we're seeing 600 billion flow into the market every year, that's a big open space, where a fairly significant transformation needs to happen.”
[24:51] “There's so much talk about this venture round, or this valuation, or this exit and there's very little dialogue about sort of holistic raising and thinking about different instruments to fill your capital needs. So I think there's an education gap. Two, I think there's a provider gap. I think we just need more of us. […] There's also, I think, some limitations on understanding of how these companies truly perform. So there's a data gap. […] Climate is not just super hard tech that takes 15 years to see your first dollar in revenue, there's this entire universe of companies. How do we think about lending to this universe? And how do we think about deploying capital at various stages […] with a reduction in risk premium for companies as they perform as they hit certain milestones?”
[39:20] “We lend broadly across climate. We support companies that are in call it mitigation, or the reduction of emissions, folks who are removing carbon from the atmosphere, and folks who work in adaptation and resilience. We don't have a CO2 equivalent or GHG emission target reduction goal, because we don't only fund companies with direct impact. […] The other thing that we look at is, we care deeply about supporting underrepresented, marginalized founders, diverse teams, and companies serving communities that may be adversely impacted because they are marginalized.”
[44:07] “If you look at where balance sheet finance needs to go, we need to see probably one to two trillion a year of capital flows into this market. So if we capture 1%, that's 10 billion a year. […] There will only be more demand for capital. And so I think there's an opportunity to position oneself as a startup and founder aligned capital provider who is also valuable or aligned around climate and to provide capital in a way that makes it easier to raise rather than harder. In our case the application processes about 10 minutes. We can cut a term sheet with just the application in about a week. And we can fund in 30 days.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 54 min | 🗓️ 05/06/2022
✅ Time saved: 52 min
