Our Investment in Float: The Best Corporate Card for Canadian SMBs
With apologies to Russian billionaires everywhere, oligopolies stink. They extract inflated profits at the expense of innovation and customer experience. So it should come as no surprise that, despite accounting for 98% of companies in Canada, SMB’s have been wildly underserved by our ‘Big 5’ banks. Moreover, while the vast majority of SMB’s prefer to pay by card, it turns out accessing corporate cards is challenging. And even if you can spend, administration is time consuming, costly and painful.
This is why we are so excited to welcome Float to the Golden portfolio. Float helps Canadian businesses bring their corporate spending into the modern age by providing the most innovative corporate card and spend management solution in the market. Today the company made two big announcements:
1. A $5M Seed round co-led by Golden Ventures and Susa Ventures, with participation from Tiny Capital (Andrew Wilkinson) Garage Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Michael Hyatt. We co-led the pre-seed in January 2020 and are thrilled to be doubling down on co-founders Griffin Keglevich, Ruslan Nikolaev, and the whole team (more on that below).
2. Welcome, Rob Khazzam! Rob is a former Uber executive and GM of Uber Canada, who recently joined the business as co-founder and CEO. He brings significant leadership and scaleup experience, as well as financial acumen and a global talent network. He was also a groomsman at my wedding and a mediocre guitar player (what a résumé!).
If you ask the Float team about the state of corporate spending, their response may sound familiar “employees hate collecting receipts, submitting expense reports, and having to spend on their personal cards. Finance hates chasing people. We can do better”. But in order to do better, there are few things you need to solve:
Access: In Canada, 70% of SMBs choose card payments as their preferred payment option but adoption lags (~25%). Long approval times, low limits, and onerous personal guarantees create tremendous friction for small business owners. In contrast, Float offers access to high-limit corporate credit cards in <3 days with no credit check, approvals, or personal guarantees required.
Control: Float allows Customers to create, manage and control virtual and physical spend cards entirely on their own. They can set custom card limits and expiration dates and view critical insights on how spend and budget is tracking across all aspects of the business. Best of all, you can decentralize these controls to any and everyone in your organization. Virtual cards use cases range from home office upgrades to paying your SaaS vendors.
Automation: All spend on Float cards automatically syncs with your accounting software. Employee spend requests are automatically tracked and approved through the expense management software, thus eliminating the need to fill out expense reports.
And for folks who prefer vitamins to painkillers, Float has perks too. For example, providing cashback on all spend and no FX fees. With Float, you earn money on every dollar spent.
It should go without saying, but the market Float is going after is massive; b2b payments in Canada come in at nearly ~$2 trillion/year. And if you thought Fintech in Canada was a small market, you just haven’t been/paying/attention.
The team saw a problem and built a solution, and the market is validating their hard work. Since March, payment volumes are up 60x and customers are up 10x, the team has doubled in size, and they have $5M in fresh capital to keep the momentum growing. This is an exceptional team, and if you’re interested in contributing to this mission, they are hiring!
