The Smarter Startup

Is Venture Debt good for you? You may be surprised to find out it could be.

Raising venture debt is always an interesting subject for startups.

If you’re in for a long race, venture debt financing could give you the air you need to get to the next peak in better shape. 

Raising venture debt is always an interesting subject for startups. For some CEOs it is completely off their radar, and for others it is a taboo subject. In between these extremes, there’s a growing number of startups using venture debt effectively to buy time for a higher valuation, making it a cheap form (in terms of amount of stock it costs) of financing while the value of your company rises.

I thought we could shed some light into whether venture debt is a good thing for your company by creating a simple model you can use to project its long-term effects on your valuation and on your stock and explore if it makes sense for you. For a sense of the value of this exercise, under a relatively conservative growth scenario, Venture Debt could save the company from having to give away 3% of equity. Before getting into detail about how this model works, it’s worthwhile to spend some time reflecting on a couple of issues you will need to think through before raising money this way: covenants and purpose.

Covenants and Purpose

Many think that some banks and venture debt providers require excessive terms and may tie up the company with covenants that hurt you in the long-run. Our experience with this is that most of the terms and covenants can be negotiated, with the exception of the investor support covenant, which requires the venture investors of your company to agree they will continue to support the company or the covenant is triggered. Even the MAC (Material Adverse Change) covenant, which seems to be the most draconian of all because it gives the venture debt provider the option of not following up on their promise if there is a significant change in the company (based on their definition), can often be negotiated. What you need here is a supportive board that has a venture investor with venture debt experience, working closely with you and your CFO to ensure you get the best deal for the company.

Putting in place venture debt is best done right after a VC raise. You can usually structure it to pull the funds much later – and face only a small portion of the costs before pulling the funds. The goal is to have it available in the future in order to buy time for growth so that the next round comes a bit later, giving you more time to increase the value of your company. This means that  growth should be the purpose for making your case to raise venture debt with your board. Emergency money or, worse, an excuse just to spend more, is what this kind of financing can unfortunately be wrongly associated with. Although if it comes down to using it in the event of an emergency, that can also be a valuable use, but in that case, it’s usually just to give another shot at pivoting and potentially save the company rather than juice value. In any event, raising venture debt with growth in mind, before you need it, will help you get better terms with debt providers and negotiate favorable covenants.

The Model

The basic assumption behind our model is that you’re raising venture debt for the purposes of growing. As such, the spreadsheet helps you look at two scenarios of growing: with and without venture debt. The results, once you input your numbers, are quite simple:

  1. Whether using venture debt made you save equity
  2. Whether using venture debt gave you time to increase the value of your company

If there is a positive number answering these questions, then you should take a closer look at venture debt. We plugged in numbers to show you how it works, feel free to substitute these with yours (red fields are input fields and the two key outcomes are highlighted in yellow).

Click here to access the spreadsheet.

The model begins by assuming a venture raise just happened (Cash at the End of Period 0, $10 million in the example). In the example, you raise $5 million in venture debt, giving away 0.2% of equity (0.1% when you put the facility in place and the other 0.1% when you draw the money), and paying a setup fee of $30,000. Cash burn is the same in both cases ($3 million), except for the venture debt payments. The example assumes a valuation growth of 25% every period (in this case, every 6 months). Note that you pay the bank the initial fee ($30,000 in the example) even though you don’t draw the venture debt of $5 million until you need it in the third semester.

This model is built to show the debt enabling a six-month funding delay in your next round ($20 million in the example) and assumes the same valuation for both scenarios, as it is just comparing financing structures in isolation. The result in the example: you raised money at a valuation of $97.6 million in the last semester rather than raising it at a valuation of $78.1 million six months before. The net value saved was $3 million, leaving you with 3.07% in equity you can keep. Not too bad!

Does venture debt work for you?

If you plug your numbers into our model through this link (red marks indicate input fields), you will see the impact of using debt in addition to equity for some of your financing. The model buys you time, but you need to keep in mind that growth needs to happen.

Venture debt works when it buys you time for a better valuation because things are going well. You pay for this time with debt and not with equity, saving you equity in two ways: initially by raising debt, and then afterwards by using that debt to get to a better valuation. If your growth scenarios come to fruition, venture debt enables you to raise money a bit later than you would, when the value of your company is higher. That is a great deal if you’re good at forecasting. You can also explore the impact of the debt using different growth scenarios, thus further exploring the potential value or the downside. Have fun 😉