Ark Kapital

Ark Capital (Now Gilion as of 2023) isn’t a VC strictly speaking. It is a revenue based funding company.

About Ark Kapital

Ark Kapital is a precision financing company that empowers technology businesses to grow faster, enables owners to maintain control, and reduces risk for investors. ArK is founded by a world-class AI technology developer, a six-time-founder, and the veteran banker you always wanted.

They raised two equity rounds. First was €15m then they added the same to total €30m in an acceleration round. They raised €165m in debt (or some structure) 6 months after their first round. As of end 2022 they had €300m to lend.

Gilion was founded in the summer of 2021 under the name Ark Kapital and launched in November the same year– by six-time entrepreneur Oliver Hildebrandt (CEO), veteran banker Axel Bruzelius (COO), and Spotify’s ex-VP of Analytics and former EQT Ventures partner Henrik Landgren (CPTO).

The firm offers a new model for tech companies to grow their business, offering non-dilutive loans and access to world class growth analytics. Founders simply plug into Gilion’s machine learning platform with all their growth related accounts and in return get access to a detailed 5-year forecast – from which they can access customized funding.

Gilion’s financial product suite currently consists of a transformative, large growth loan that spans between €1-€10m, lasting up to seven years, with repayments not starting for two-to-three years.

The second loan product in the portfolio allows founders to get instant access to the money they’ve earned through various marketplaces or app stores, allowing reinvestment into growth peaks. Both products are fully non-dilutive.

LP Investment

Alliance VC shared why they invested in Ark Capital in 2023. 

As startups grow and have real revenue and cash flow, it makes sense to finance some of the future growth with debt. While Alliance believes, and it should be said we are not unbiased, equity from venture capital funds is the best way to finance startups, it is great when equity is combined with other types of financing.

A challenge for software startups that want to borrow money is that they generally are unprofitable and lack ‘hard assets’, like real estate, to use as collateral. Startups don’t get full credit for the fact that both SaaS and consumer subscriptions have recurring and predictable revenue streams, as banks don’t primarily look at cohort data, unit economics and similar operational data that, in our opinion, says a lot more about the future of a company than historical income statements and balance sheets.

Ark Kapital was founded in 2021 to be a data-driven lender that uses AI to analyze operational data (in addition to traditional financial information) to predict future performance and extend loans up to seven years based on that analysis. We believe that is a great way to enable debt financing for startups in a scalable way.

What attracted us to Ark Kapital specifically when we invested in early 2022 was the founding team of Oliver Hildebrandt, Henrik Landgren and Axel Bruzelius. Before funding Ark Kapital Oliver was a serial entrepreneur, Henrik was a venture investor and analytics executive, and Axel was a banker lending to startups. We thought that combination of experiences gave the foundation to build a technology-driven lender that could combine fast growth, AI-driven analysis, and the best of traditional loan underwriting.

This and last year have proven how important access to capital is, especially in tougher times, and we believe data-driven lending will play an even more important role in startup financing going forward.

Ark Kapital Pitch Deck

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