Miguel Fernandez

The through-line

Everything Miguel Fernandez has built traces back to one question he could not escape as a salesperson: how does the customer pay for this. Running sales, success and international at an early SaaS company, he found that "every customer wanted to pay monthly and we near the cash up front," and the only lever available to close that gap was a heavy discount to buy an annual prepayment [2]. He reframes that mismatch as a question of who is forced to act as a lender: a vendor "can either offer flexible payment terms to a buyer and if the vendor is using their own balance sheet then they're playing bank or they can force the buyer to pay up front but then the buyer is playing bank" [1]. Capchase exists to take that role away from both of them.

What has shifted is the shape of the answer rather than the problem. The company began as a working capital product for software businesses, offering non-dilutive funding to SaaS companies [2][4][10], moved to financing the buyer's purchase of the vendor's product, and now runs primarily as an equipment financing business [1]. Fernandez describes this as market pull rather than strategy: "the market started pulling us towards doing more and more longer term," from twelve-month software deals to software and hardware bundles to hardware and equipment on their own [1]. The constant is the friction at the point of sale, and the conviction that whoever removes it gets paid.

On the point-of-sale friction that started everything

The original insight came from watching a cash flow mismatch destroy pricing power. A SaaS company with a few million on its balance sheet cannot finance its customers, and a customer paying up front is financing the vendor, so the discount becomes the clearing price for the disagreement [2]. When Fernandez tested the idea of letting the vendor collect the full contract value while the buyer pays monthly, founders reacted to it as a commercial tool rather than a treasury one: it would let them "increase prices and reduce sales cycles," which in SaaS is normally a trade-off where one comes at the expense of the other [2]. That same framing survives in the equipment business today, where vendors tell him the product is not only working capital but a way to "close more deals, close them faster, increase the average order size, increase repeat customers" [1]. The whole pitch, in his words, is "taking friction out of the sales process" without giving in on working capital [1].

On embedding financing inside the vendor's sales process

Fernandez is emphatic that Capchase is "very vendor centric": the go-to-market runs through vendors, and the internal sales team exists mainly to find and manage vendor relationships rather than to sell to end buyers [1]. What he credits for fast growth is refusing to be one financing partner among several. Capchase deploys wherever the seller already works, as a widget inside the CRM or an AI agent in email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or text, so a rep negotiating a deal can get a qualification, pull documentation and drop financing terms into a quote without waiting on a third party [1]. The service level he holds the team to is a response to a seller on a live deal in under fifteen minutes, which he treats as the wedge into becoming the vendor's daily tool rather than an occasional one [1].

Two pieces of engineering carry most of the weight. The first is automated qualification to the point where no application is filled in at all: buyer information is pulled from the vendor's systems and approved in real time, so a seller can "lead with flexible payment terms" long before a deal is close to signature [1]. The second is what he calls the payment link, where a final quote uploaded by the vendor becomes a single online document with disclosures and the financing agreement attached, signed once by the buyer, then vaulted and shared automatically. He describes it as collapsing ten to fifty emails between three parties into one smooth experience, and concedes it "sounds simple but it it requires like a ton of uh work behind the scenes" [1]. His justification is generational rather than technical: sellers and buyers are consumers, and "they expect the same experience in the day-to-day job and they do when they're buying something online" [1]. The vendors who adopt fastest are those with multiple sellers who do not know how to talk about financing, because the tool abstracts the terms and paperwork away and "kind of like does the enablement for them" [1].

On following the market from software into equipment

Equipment financing attracts him because it is a much larger industry and because he is comfortable with the advantage technology gives against traditional incumbents [1]. Capchase sits squarely in mid ticket, averaging a little above one hundred thousand dollars per transaction, able to go as low as 2.5 thousand depending on the state and as high as a couple of million, with the sweet spot in the hundreds of thousands [1]. Scale comes from concentration in a few strong vendors rather than a long tail: some vendors run forty to fifty million a year through Capchase, composed of thousands of their own clients, and Fernandez calls this "riding uh alongside some very large vendors with great product market fit" [1]. Current vendor concentration sits in cyber security firms writing three to five year deals into SLED and small and medium businesses, fleet management for specialty fleets, robotics and surveillance cameras, with healthcare devices, materials handling and precision machinery named as the next verticals [1]. Five years in, the company has done about one and a half billion in financing and runs hybrid across New York, San Francisco, Madrid and Barcelona with roughly ninety people and engineering concentrated in Spain [1].

On owning the balance sheet and funding the lender

Capchase has carried its own balance sheet from the beginning, and Fernandez defends that as a deliberate choice about flexibility and user experience rather than an accident of history: "it's kind of like in our DNA" [1]. That has meant a long march through private credit funds, banks, asset managers and investment banks [1]. He is clear-eyed about the arithmetic of financing a lender. Returns on the money lent out are small, so it cannot be funded with expensive capital, which forces a permanent parallel track of raising equity and raising debt [2]. Venture money came first because early VC investors see unlimited upside against limited downside, but he did not want to lend VC money, so he raised debt from family offices and individuals covered by the equity, extending runway without over-leveraging the company [2]. Credit facilities were pursued from day zero and he describes them as a very different animal, with the first taking three to four months to close, because warehouse lenders have venture-scale downside and only teens returns, so they underwrite the company itself and its ability to underwrite others [2]. How founders should think about financing options by stage, and how fundraising conditions have changed, is a subject he has returned to elsewhere [10][12].

On underwriting: giving money is easy, getting it back is hard

Capchase invested in risk and data very early precisely because the first losses would have been fatal: "we can't afford to have a Miss in the first few customers we really need to nail this" [2]. The early work was deliberately manual, closer to investment banking than to fintech, building operating models of customer businesses by hand to judge how much financing they could carry and how much would come back [2]. His compressed statement of the discipline is that "the easy thing in fintech is to give money and the hard thing is to get it back" [2]. Automation followed the learning rather than preceding it, with each customer and each repayment feeding more of the underwriting and analysis process into code [2]. Sequencing was the same at the product level: financing existing customer bases felt tractable, so sitting in the middle of the transaction was parked until the company understood SaaS performance well enough to come back to it [2].

On AI: leading edge, not bleeding edge

Asked to place himself, Fernandez picks leading edge without hesitation, on the grounds that transactions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars leave no room for a bad surprise: "you just don't want to make a mistake" and either put the vendor or buyer in a pickle or lose money because an agent made a stupid decision [1]. His stated order of operations is automation first, then progressive deployment of AI agents, and the agents' job is bounded. They take "out the busy work from our operations team" and from users, and they surface information for humans instead of approving deals or generating documents [1]. He puts the productivity claim plainly: the point is that one person who could approve thirty deals a day can now approve three hundred, "but it's not an AI agent approving 300" [1]. He also pushes back on the idea that leverage removes effort, noting that the person using the agent still has to work hard and do a good job [1]. AI is, in his account, the current name for a longer automation trend aimed at reducing mistakes and iterations and improving the experience for both vendor and buyer [1].

On which markets are worth entering

Capchase has been international from the start, operating across the US, Canada and Europe, which matters to the vendors it serves but adds real complexity, down to French-language requirements in Quebec [1]. Fernandez applies a consistent framework to each new market: market size on one side, competition, regulatory framework and localization needs on the other, then a judgment about which dominates [1]. The results are counterintuitive. The UK and Ireland were entered quickly even though Ireland is small, because the framework scored easy, while Germany and France, both large, have been left alone for now because regulation and localization demands are heavy [1].

On consolidating the space

The acquisition of Vartana, a tech-enabled player in equipment financing, is presented as a decision to stop fighting a hard competitor and combine instead, on the reasoning that together they "would be the only the only party in the whole space that has tech that embeds in a vendor sales process" [1]. He lists the conventional benefits, a larger balance sheet, more scale, lower cost of capital, and the best of both platforms and programs, but treats the technology position as the more interesting prize [1]. He also signals more to come: "I think it's not going to be the last acquisition that we do," because when Capchase deploys its technology inside a vendor it captures a large share of that vendor's financing wallet, which means partnering with other equipment financing companies could make them "multiples larger than what they are today" [1]. How to think about competitors more broadly is a topic he has addressed at length elsewhere [12].

On sales as the skill that compounds

Fernandez joined that first SaaS company as employee number nine and its first salesperson, believing from the job description that it was close to strategy consulting, and was handed a phone and told to cold call [2]. He had avoided that work out of embarrassment and fear of rejection, and now calls the three years invaluable: "in every single interaction if you think about it you're selling something," whether an idea, a plan, a job or a product [2]. The deeper value he attaches to it is understanding the other side's perspective well enough to present a solution that actually works for their problem, and he argues everyone should practise it deliberately rather than assume they picked it up naturally [2]. The same stint taught him how a startup finds product-market fit, sells, and builds organizational structure, plus a catalogue of things to avoid learned by trial and error [2].

On finding the idea

Capchase was not the idea he arrived at business school with, and it took roughly six months of structured search to reach it [2]. The method was two-week sprints going very deep on a candidate idea, then either going deeper or discarding it and moving to something learned along the way, with adjacent areas explored whenever complications surfaced [2]. What made the eventual idea stick was recognition rather than novelty, the realisation that it would have solved his own past problems [2]. Validation came from founders' reactions, and the product was pulled forward by their follow-up question, which was whether they could do the same thing with their existing customer base, revealing that founders were hunting for growth capital that was not VC money [2][4]. From the first customer to a seed round the process was organic, running through a Harvard startup competition and inbound investor interest, and once the seed closed, combining school and the company became impossible, so he dropped out [2]. The first product launched in August 2020 and, in his phrase, "we had instant product Market fit" [2].

On managing a company through its awkward sizes

Fernandez is blunt that people management has been the hardest part, because in the end "everything is about people" along with emotions, relationships and trust [2]. The team was remote from day one, split between Madrid and Boston, and the first hires were engineers and data scientists recruited in Europe on the reasoning that "the talent to cost ratio being far superior" made sense for an early-stage company [2]. The break point he keeps returning to falls somewhere between twenty and forty people, where "you just can no longer rely on organic communication being the main mode of people being up to date," work runs in parallel streams, and documentation, reporting, alignment and OKRs have to be built deliberately [2]. Past that, he argues, complexity grows linearly rather than exponentially, which makes the twenty-to-forty gap the one worth preparing for [2]. Hiring senior leaders changed the company's management vocabulary: a VP of tech who had spent close to a decade at Google brought a discipline for finding, interviewing, nurturing, performance-managing and promoting people that Fernandez regards as the thing very large tech companies do genuinely well [2]. At the senior and staff team level the company now works from a book on organizational health, building enough trust to have hard competing arguments, getting commitment to what is decided, and holding each other accountable [2]. He also holds that hiring standards should never be lowered, however fast the company is growing [2]. His summary of the arc is unsentimental: planning cycles still surface learnings every time, but watching noise and chaos turn into something streamlined makes the early brutality worth it [2].

Takeaways

• Frame flexible payment terms as a question of who is acting as the bank: the vendor using its own balance sheet, or the buyer paying up front [1].
• Distribution beats being on a panel of lenders. Embed in the CRM, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and text where sellers already work, and answer live deals in under fifteen minutes [1].
• Automate qualification to the point where no application exists, so a seller can lead a negotiation with financing terms rather than bolt them on at the end [1].
• Deploy AI to remove busy work and multiply a human approver's throughput, not to make credit decisions on six-figure transactions [1].
• Fund a lending business with the right liability structure: equity for the company, debt from family offices and individuals covered by that equity, and credit facilities pursued from day zero [2].
• In fintech, "the easy thing in fintech is to give money and the hard thing is to get it back," which justifies manual, investment-banking-grade underwriting before automating it [2].
• Score new markets on size against competition, regulation and localization: small and easy like Ireland can beat large and heavily regulated like Germany or France [1].
• Expect organic communication to break somewhere between twenty and forty people, and build documentation, reporting and OKR structures before that point [2].