Category
- Band stories
Written by
Son Yang (Director)
Date
Empty
It's often said that early-stage startup founders need to do everything well, from A to Z. They have to clearly set the company's vision and direction, make impressive products, hire great people, sharpen their insights about consumers, and bring in funding at the right time. There’s an endless list of tasks and heavy responsibility. Out of all these, though, many founders say the hardest part is 'securing funds.' According to a July 2022 survey by D.Camp and Bundang Seoul National University Hospital, 44.6% of founders picked 'funding pressure and investment attraction' as their biggest source of stress.
Most early startups have little revenue or profit, so they inevitably need to secure external funds. Usually, this means attracting investment from institutional investors like VCs or getting policy funds/loans from government agencies. But these funding avenues are very limited, and just going from review to getting funds takes at least several months—costing a huge amount of the founder’s time and resources. Plus, while most founders have experience building products or developing businesses, very few have ever raised money by pitching their company’s vision and potential to outside investors.
V1C is a startup that addresses the biggest concerns of fellow founders. They operate 'RevenueMarket', a solution that provides growth capital based on recurring or past revenue data from startups. CEO Do Eun-wook and co-founder Lim Young-bin of V1C founded the Corporate Finance Society together while studying business at Korea University, and have worked together for a long time in Morgan Stanley's corporate finance division. Along the way, they felt the current capital market wasn’t friendly to startups or founders, so—based on mature business models and data from recent years—they began building a venture debt financial product that traditional institutions find hard to offer. Simply put, RevenueMarket lets any startup with revenue raise growth capital—without equity dilution, at a reasonable interest rate, and, as fast as within 48 hours. At present, more than 100 startups have applied for or are using the service.
While solutions that help founders with product development, organizational management, and user data have seen a lot of progress, the way startups secure capital still hasn’t changed much in decades due to the nature of the industry. Many VCs, including us, strive to be founder-friendly, but there are limits—as investors, it’s hard to fully let go of our opportunistic side. At BASS Investment, we were constantly thinking about how we could be a more genuinely helpful VC, and that's when we met V1C.
I still remember vividly what CEO Do Eun-wook said when we first met: “Every founder stands before a VC at their very best moment. No matter how impressive a startup looks, even when they finally secure investment at that moment, fierce challenges and worries soon follow. There are countless founders who, at that moment, don't even get to meet a VC.” It was something along those lines.
At that moment, I realized that BASS Investment and RevenueMarket are addressing the same problem in different ways. Honestly, there are parts where RevenueMarket feels even more innovative and founder-friendly. That’s why BASS Investment is joining them on this journey. We believe that RevenueMarket will grow to be the most founder-friendly funding method, and we look forward to the day when we can meet many founders in ways that create real synergy with BASS Investment.
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