My name went up on the Cambridge Wilkinson site this week. I have joined the firm as a Senior Advisor.
I met Cambridge Wilkinson as a client, not as a banker. They raised my Series A1 at Finexio. Then they did the harder thing: I was standing up a new supply chain financing business inside the company, and it needed a forward flow structure that does not sit on a shelf anywhere. Cambridge Wilkinson built it and brought in the lead investor who took the board seat.
That investor stayed eight years and helped the company substantially the entire way.
Over eleven years I raised roughly $100 million in equity and debt from five publicly traded bank investors and built Finexio past $7 billion in annualized payment volume. The capital that mattered most was never the largest check.
It was the right one.
Capital is not a commodity
Founders often talk about a raise as if the only variables are amount, valuation, and price. Those matter, but they do not tell you whether the capital will actually fit the business.
A lending or payments platform can have a strong product, real customers, and a full pipeline, then run straight into the limits of its own capital structure. The facility is too small to fund the next hundred million of originations. The advance rate does not match the assets. The duration is wrong. Covenants designed for a different business turn normal growth into a technical problem. Management starts managing the facility instead of the company.
That is not a fundraising problem. It is a design problem.
The job is to match the capital to the economic engine underneath the business: how quickly cash goes out, when it comes back, what losses look like, how the pool seasons, where concentration sits, and how much contribution survives after the cost of funds. If those pieces do not fit, a large commitment can still be unusable capital.
More money does not repair the wrong structure.
The three tests that matter
I learned to judge capital against three questions.
First, does the structure fit how the company actually makes money? Advance rates, eligibility rules, loss curves, duration, concentration limits, amortization triggers, and the equity required alongside the facility all have to be read together. A term sheet can look cheap and still become the most expensive document in the company if it restricts the assets that generate the return.
Second, can the structure grow with the business? Good companies should not have to rebuild the entire capital stack every time they cross another volume threshold. They need a facility with room, flexibility, and capital providers who understand what happens when originations accelerate or an acquisition changes the pool.
Third, who is sitting across the table after the money arrives? Capital providers see companies, boards, executives, and market cycles all day. The right one brings pattern recognition, introductions, judgment, and credibility when the next decision gets hard. The investor Cambridge Wilkinson brought into Finexio did that for eight years.
Anyone can email a deck to fifty lenders. Almost nobody finds the one investor still creating value in year eight.
Why Cambridge Wilkinson
Cambridge Wilkinson runs debt and equity raises from $25 million to $5 billion. The work spans senior and unsecured facilities, growth equity, forward flow, warehouse lines, portfolio sales, NAV facilities, non-dilutive GP financing, and SPV leverage. The firm has more than forty bankers and originators, supported by a network of banks, private credit funds, insurance companies, family offices, private equity firms, and institutional investors built over decades.
Scale matters, but judgment matters more.
Rob Bolandian, Howard Chernin, Tom McDermott, and the rest of the senior team have spent their careers inside specialty finance, lending, credit, payments, and operating businesses. They can read a loan book the way an operator reads it. They know the difference between a company that needs more lenders and one that needs a different structure. They know which capital providers will understand the assets, and which conversations are a waste of a month.
Speed falls out of that knowledge, and time is the most expensive line item in any raise.
Where this is useful
For a private equity or private credit fund, the conversation can cover fund-level leverage, GP and management company financing, NAV facilities, SPV leverage, acquisition debt for a platform or an add-on, or forward flow for a portfolio company that originates assets.
For a fintech, payments company, or specialty finance founder, it can mean building the credit facility beneath a new product, funding the next stage of originations without selling more equity than necessary, or restructuring capital that worked at $25 million of volume but will not work at $250 million.
The common question is simple: what capital lets this business do next what its current structure will not?
I know this space and I know these people. If you are working through one of these problems, send me a note. I will either look at it with you or put you straight in front of Rob and Howard.
The right capital does more than fund the company.
It helps build it.