Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 4)

Rebecca Kacaba: Equity crowdfunding limits the amount you can invest. It’s in proportion to what your income is. I don’t fundamentally believe that, because you don’t meet an income threshold, you should not have a right to make an investment. The amount that they can invest caps how much they can lose. I think what you’re saying is because doctors make a lot of money, they know how to invest. That’s not necessarily true.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not saying that. That doctor is a customer of the product that Modernizing Medicine is selling. They have a visceral understanding of what that business is because they are the customers.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How many companies are raising funds on your platform right now?

Rebecca Kacaba: Between 30 and 40 new companies every month and over $1.6 billion in capital transacted through the platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are there any stage and sector trends?

Rebecca Kacaba: Usually, we’ll see a good amount of technology, real estate, and anything that’s going the Wall Street trend. Food tech is an interesting emerging space.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Rebecca Kacaba: We charge technology fees – setup, monthly, and transactional. We are very aligned with our clients. They can pay as they raise capital. We’re not asking them for a big upfront payment. We make money as they make money.

Sramana Mitra: You take a percentage of the transaction?

Rebecca Kacaba: Yes, under our broker-dealer model. In other ways, they pay after they close capital.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sankaet Pathak, CEO of Synapse (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given your vantage point, what open problems do you see out there? Not just ones you are working on but things that other entrepreneurs can work on.

Sankaet Pathak: There are a couple of problems that are infrastructure-focused. Then there is one thing that is more consumer-focused that I feel somebody should work on. On the infrastructure side, getting really good at risk and credit underwriting at a global scale is an open opportunity. Nobody is doing a phenomenal job on that.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 1)

Equity Crowdfunding is evolving. This conversation highlights some of the trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to DealMaker.

Rebecca Kacaba: I was a capital market attorney for over a decade before founding DealMaker. The idea for DealMaker was born out of the problems my clients were having in trying to raise capital. It was too expensive and it was taking too long. I wanted to solve these problems for them.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sankaet Pathak, CEO of Synapse (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You are talking about US accounts for Indian residents?

Sankaet Pathak: Yes. Their thought process stops there. They’re more focused on how much money leaves India versus what other obligations come as a function of it. Primarily, US regulators are still more relevant.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. At some level, I feel like you might get some traction if you offer your services to Indian banks that want to provide it to their customers.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sankaet Pathak, CEO of Synapse (Part 1)

Sankaet is building interesting infrastructure products for FinTech. Lots of insights, also, on open opportunities within the field for new entrepreneurs to latch onto.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Synapse.

Sankaet Pathak: I’m the Founder and CEO of Synapse. If you haven’t heard of Synapse, we are what’s considered a Banking-as-a-Service provider based in San Francisco.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How big is this segment you’re catering to?

Brian Cox: I always say a third of the country. Miami Herald did an article this year talking about the impact of the infrastructure bill. There are a couple of programs that are based on income level qualifiers. One of those is the affordable connectivity program which is how we provide the majority of our broadband. They did some math and found that 6.4 million households in Florida qualified for this program.