Cantaloupe and Fundbox Debut Small Business Working Capital Platform

Self-service commerce technology company Cantaloupe has introduced a small business financing solution.

Cantaloupe Capital, announced in a news release Wednesday (Feb. 5), is being introduced in collaboration with Fundbox, a working capital platform for small businesses. The company said this offering gives small businesses streamlined access to capital for expansion via equipment investments and flexible access to cash flow.

“In the self-service retail industry, small businesses often face challenges accessing traditional financing options,” the company said, pointing to Federal Reserve data showing that just 43% of small business startups with employees who applied for traditional financing received it.

The figure is even lower for owner-operated startups, at 29%, the company added. To ease this burden, the release added, Cantaloupe focuses on factors like steady business performance and growth potential to give more operators access to the capital they need to succeed.

“The majority of our customers are small and growing businesses, many of them sole proprietors. Cantaloupe understands their need for accessible financing solutions that can help them scale their operations,” said Elyssa Steiner, Cantaloupe’s chief marketing officer. “With Cantaloupe Capital, we’re breaking down barriers to funding by facilitating quick and easy online access to capital for owner-operators that will allow them to invest in new equipment, manage seasonal fluctuations, and capitalize on growth opportunities in the rapidly evolving self-service retail space.”

The collaboration follows a year in which companies, particularly middle market ones, increasingly leveraged working capital, as PYMNTS wrote recently.

The game-changer here, that report said, was the use of virtual card payments, which increased their usage by 32%, going from being a simple vendor payment method to a sophisticated working capital solution.

“They’re the superpower of working capital,” Darren Parslow, global head of Visa Commercial Solutions, said of virtual cards in an interview here in November, adding that this shift is in line with the broader trend in corporate finance of leveraging virtual cards to optimize cash flow, extend days payable outstanding (DPO) and streamline working capital.

By merging spend management with credit solutions, businesses can gain more capacity to turn transactions into opportunities for liquidity and growth than traditional solutions provide, partially by leveraging virtual cards as both a payment and financing tool, that report added.

“The key is to be proactive,” Lauren Hewings, head of working capital solutioning at Visa, told PYMNTS. “With the right strategies in place, middle-market corporates can leverage working capital to thrive in a competitive global market.”