Funding
We strive to be the best mission and founder aligned partner for startups and partners.
Urban Us supports a wide range of funding needs.
URBAN-X is the best place to start for pre-seed and seed stage startups that need to work through major product development or customer discovery projects in preparation for a seed or seed+ round.
Urban Us Ventures is ideal for startups that have a clear path to series A and need the equity capital to get there.
Urban Us Credit is focused on capital needs of early-stage companies that can benefit from other types of capital such as revenue-based finance, working capital or asset finance. Most of the startups we invest in from our credit arm work with with hardware assets and are moving into early commercial scale deployment of their products and services.
URBAN-X
We built an accelerator, URBAN-X, in partnership with BMW Group and MINI. We’ve found the program to be helpful to solve specific company building challenges, so that founders can be well prepared to successfully raise seed funding. URBAN-X is designed to help with company building in preparation for seed stage fundraising. While we do invest capital, we also make significant time and in-kind investments. In our experience, this time investment ensures that founders increase their chances of successful fundraising because we can do more than prepare a sound pitch. We can also make fundamental changes to products, sales, communications and other core aspects of the business while we work together for 20+ weeks.
More on URBAN-X.
Urban Us VC
Urban Us VC picks up where URBAN-X ends. Some startups skip URBAN-X since they have few risks they need to mitigate as they work towards growth funding. During the seed stage, founders benefit from having more than one investor that combines deep startup building experience with strong domain expertise. Usually, this means we invest alongside well-known generalist VCs, as well as corporate VCs and knowledgeable angels.
About 50% of the startups we work with make use of hardware and real assets. That’s not a real surprise – software alone can’t change the physical environment. At some point you need people and machines (and, increasingly, robots). Beyond traditional seed finance, these startups use capital like revenue-based finance, asset finance, project finance, working capital, and grants. We’re deeply experienced with more complex capital requirements, and it’s why we created Urban Us Credit.
Urban Us Credit
Urban Us Credit is focused on additional types of funding, often appropriate for hardware or asset-intensive businesses and that can ideally play an essential role in helping to win business by bringing capex to the table and supporting revenue growth. Urban Us Credit offers a range of solutions for working capital, leasing, revenue-based finance, etc. Just like the rest of our funds, we’re happy to be first, try to be creative in our approaches and always apply a startup focused lens.
Here’s how we think this all fits together. If you’re working mainly with software, it makes sense to focus on equity capital, though there are other options like grants or revenue-based finance. As you add hardware and more capital intensive needs for your business it makes sense to explore additional types of capital that can preserve ownership in your company and better align with project needs.
For investors seeking investments in urbantech and co-investment opportunities, we share monthly updates on our portfolio companies and routinely make introductions and host investor days. We believe that founders benefit from multiple engaged and committed investors with different experiences and networks. So we’ve sized our funds and allocation strategies to make room for the best mix of company building and domain expertise. Here is a longer discussion on how our equity investments are optimized for founders and co-investors.