Substrate

Why we exist

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow America's industrial GDP, starting with solving the endemic problem of equipment financing.

Equipment financing is how American industry buys its tools. Few businesses pay upfront for critical machinery, instead relying on financing to spread the cost over time. This $1.3T system underpins entire sectors, including manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture — but runs on outdated infrastructure. Third-party lenders dominate the market with 40% APRs, manual approvals, and paper-heavy processes, accounting for 83% of all financed sales ($1.1T of annual volume).

A few giants like John Deere and Caterpillar have solved this by building in-house banks to lend directly to customers. But 99.5% of equipment vendors can’t afford to. Substrate gives them that superpower with AI-powered underwriting, capital-as-a-service, point-of-sale integrations, and a suite of software/financial tools.

Our customers span construction auctioneers to robotics startups, ambulance marketplaces to family-owned CNC distributors. Wherever equipment is sold, we want to be the financial OS powering the transaction.

Who we are

This is an unreasonably challenging problem. That is why we are assembling an unreasonably talented team across industrials, technology, and capital markets.

Our team of 9 comes from places like Ramp, SpaceX, and Anthropic. Collectively, we’ve engineered fintech platforms used by millions, scaled an equipment finance fund to $100M+ revenue, and raised billions in debt.

We raised a $7M seed from top technology, industrials, and fintech to execute our mission, including:

• Floodgate: first investors in Lyft, Twitter, Applied Intuition, and more.

• Ironspring Ventures: founder is also CEO of Holt, the largest Caterpillar dealer in America.

• Neo: early investors in Kalshi, Cursor, Ramp, Cognition, and more.

• Steel Atlas: boutique industrials fund

We are always on the lookout for great teammates. If you are someone who thinks America's industrial decline is a national crisis and wants to help lead the turnaround, we would love to hear from you.

What we are looking for

You’ll thrive here if you:

• Approach your work like a craft or quest

• Have a track record of self-driven building, designing, selling, or writing

• Combine pragmatic realism with a dose of earnest idealism

• Frequently go down personal rabbit-holes

• Our culture excites you

We’re especially drawn to people who’ve:

• Built regulated products at scale, especially at a fast-growing fintech (Stripe, Ramp, Square, Parafin, Robinhood, etc)

• Come from places with a strong product culture (Notion, Linear, Telegram, etc)

• Founded companies, early hires at startups, or started new teams within larger organizations

Don’t proceed if:

• You want a 9-5

• You aren’t excited by our mission

• You aren’t comfortable with ambiguity or having a high degree of ownership

If none of our open roles suit you but you still want to get involved, please reach out to our CEO Kelvin at kelvin@joinsubstrate.com. When we meet outstanding individuals who share our values and mission, we go out of our way to figure out how to work with them.

Resources

Relevant readings about our market, opportunity, and more.

• product engineering @ substrate

• why reindustrializing America matters

• by default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI

• 2024 equipment finance industry report