Boost and Co.
Lance Myserbo-Witch identified a market gap in European startup financing. While venture capital dilutes founder equity and banks won't lend to early-stage companies, there's a middle ground: venture debt. Boost and Co. emerged as a lending vehicle that bridges this gap, allowing founders to preserve control while accessing capital.
Boost and Co. structures loans with three revenue components: a 1-2% origination fee, an 8-12% interest rate (depending on company maturity and risk), and warrant packages representing 10-15% of the loan amount. This three-part structure mirrors traditional mezzanine finance but targets high-tech SaaS businesses rather than mature companies. Interest-only periods of 6-12 months allow early-stage companies to hit milestones before servicing principal.
Lance raised capital from large pension funds as limited partners, who pay Boost and Co. a 2% management fee on assets under management. This LP-backed model gave him dry powder to deploy at scale. By the interview, Boost and Co. had completed 25 deals totaling $120 million in capital deployed, with $150 million in assets under management.
Recent deal highlight: Idio, a SaaS company that analyzes webpage reading behavior to help refine content marketing. Boost and Co. deployed £1.25 million (approximately $1.75 million) with a 10% interest rate, demonstrating the fund's ability to support SaaS companies. The warrant structure—tying upside to company success—aligns incentives between lender and founder while staying subordinate to equity investors. Lance deliberately avoids the power-law model of venture capital, preferring many small bets to concentrated large ones, reducing portfolio risk.
- •By identifying venture debt as an underserved middle ground between dilutive VC and inaccessible bank lending, Boost and Co. solved a genuine pain point that founders actively needed but couldn't access in Europe.
- •The three-part revenue model (origination fees, interest, warrants) simultaneously addresses founder concerns about dilution while ensuring lender upside, creating a win-win that traditional lenders couldn't offer.
- •Securing pension funds as LPs provided both credibility and capital at scale, enabling rapid deployment across 25 deals and generating recurring management fees that de-risked the business model.
- •The warrant structure directly aligns lender and founder incentives around company success rather than extraction, fundamentally changing the lender-borrower dynamic from adversarial to partnership-oriented.
- 1.Identify an underserved financial segment by mapping the gaps between existing solutions (e.g., VC dilution vs. bank requirements) and interview 20+ potential customers to validate their unmet need.
- 2.Design a multi-component revenue model where each component addresses a specific stakeholder concern: one for founders (interest-only periods), one for you (origination and interest), and one for alignment (warrants).
- 3.Build institutional credibility by pitching to large capital providers (pension funds, endowments) who have dry powder and need asset managers, then use their backing to attract deal flow.
- 4.Deploy capital across many small bets rather than concentrating risk in few large deals, proving statistical consistency in returns that attracts more institutional capital and reduces portfolio volatility.
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