T-Rex

Benjamin Cohen spent his first five years at Macquarie Bank in energy capital markets, where he lived through the financial crisis. He saw how opaque and inefficient markets, especially smaller and less-covered ones, lacked price discovery, so assets stopped trading and capital dried up. He also saw that technology was the unglamorous plumbing that could make finance more robust. Renewable energy looked like a blank slate, and in 2012 he met a venture investor in San Francisco who supported the idea.

T-Rex set out to package complex securitized assets, such as pools of solar loans, so that institutional investors could slice and dice risk and see it clearly. The company describes its model as enterprise SaaS, with subscribers across the deal ecosystem: originators, intermediaries, lending banks, investment banks, and institutional investors. Cohen said the company spent about two years building the platform before earning a dollar, then a further year and a half building out infrastructure with a full team before launch. Much of the engineering sits in Tel Aviv, where the team reports deep computer science training and very low attrition. Cohen said he invested his life savings, though he did not give a specific figure.

Customers came mostly through a high-touch enterprise motion. Small solar customers could sign up online with a credit card and require almost no sales cost, while large investment banks could take a year to convert, with all-in customer acquisition costs reaching high tens of thousands of dollars. The company relied on conferences, including a major structured finance event in Vegas where it hosted a booth and moderated a panel, with sponsorships under $10,000 because competition was limited and the main rival was in-house Excel models. The company also said it had no paid marketing spend in the traditional sense and was instead building relationships with people who could see the team in person.

The strongest signal was expansion. One early customer renewed at more than four times its original rate, and the company's land-and-expand strategy led it to discount in year one, expecting high stickiness afterward. Expansion came from adding seats, modules, and marketplace access, and from a broker-dealer that earns success fees on transactions. Cohen said there had been no churn, though the host described net negative churn. The company deliberately held back revenue figures, so the scale of traction rests mostly on host estimates and on the guest's statement that seven figures of ARR came within six months of revenue.

As of the interview, T-Rex had about 21 employees, with roughly half in Tel Aviv, and had raised about $15 million across a Series A and Series B. It counted over 225 users, described as paying customers or paying through transactions, and planned an automated marketplace later in 2017. Cohen did not disclose current revenue, so the figure of around $450,000 per month came from the host's estimate.