The best companies own their whole stack. We built ours the same way.

OHOliver Hamilton

Last edited 5 min read

In 1849, gold drew hundreds of thousands of people to California. Some miners made a killing, but the real winners were the merchants who sold them the supplies. Levi Strauss was one of them: he opened a pants business in San Francisco in 1853, and over 170 years later his jeans business does over six billion a year in revenue.

The SaaS boom beat that story to death as standard startup advice: don't dig for gold, sell jeans to the people who do.

AI lets anyone make jeans, picks and shovels. Value has now returned to the work itself. For us that work is provisioning capital: deciding who to fund, moving the money, and getting it back.

Most capital providers still buy their tools from someone else. On top of a bank sit a payments processor, a data vendor, a decisioning vendor and a servicing vendor, with a team in the middle holding them together.

Spring has no one in the middle. We built every layer ourselves, from the bank partnership to the products, and have funded more than $200 million to over 200 businesses.

The Spring stack, bottom to top.

  1. Our bank partner provides the capital we fund our customers with.

  2. ACH, wire, RTP and FedNow move money out when we fund and back in when it is paid.

  3. One ledger records every dollar, and everyone works from it.

  4. We read a business's bank, books, sales channels and retailer portals directly.

  5. Funding decisions come from live data, not last quarter's statements.

  6. Payments are matched to the invoices they settle, and short pays are traced to their cause.

  7. Invoice factoring, PO financing, Demand Plan and Bridge Funding all run on the same stack.

Why we built it ourselves

Changes that cross layers are easy. The layers talk to each other directly. When a brand starts selling into a new retailer, we connect that retailer's portal, and the risk layer can use what it reads the same week, because both layers are our code. When we learn that a signal predicts late payments, we add it to the data we collect and to the model that decides, in one change, with no vendor roadmap to wait on.

Three new retailer portals connect, and the risk model starts using their data.

We build what the customer needs, at any layer. When a customer needs something new, we build it where it belongs, even if that is three layers down. When a product needs to work differently, we change the layers underneath it together. We are not limited to what a vendor's settings allow.

We control the parts that matter. We use outside providers where they help, mostly to fetch and enrich data, but the systems that decide, move and account for money are our own code. When something breaks there, we can fix it ourselves, usually the same day.

A smaller team moves faster. Fewer integration meetings, fewer vendor tickets, less translating between systems. We iterate on a product in days and add a new input to the decision model without a project plan. Owning more also means there is more to build and maintain, and that is the work we are hiring for.

Lower costs, lower prices

Every layer we build instead of rent is vendor margin we keep. All of that adds up to a lower cost to serve each business.

Even before price, another option helps. Every capital provider in a market gives a business one more offer to compare. If a business picks our rate, it is usually because it is the best one available, so the business is better off than if we were not there.

Lower costs let us go further. A capital provider's price has to cover its losses, its capital and its operating cost. When our operating cost per dollar funded is lower, we can offer a lower rate for the same risk and still earn a good return. Better prices win more of the businesses that are who they say they are and pay on time, and each of those makes the next decision better:

The flywheel. Better prices bring more good businesses, more businesses bring more data to decide with, more data brings more confident decisions, and confident decisions let us price better again.

The same shows up in how the business scales. A capital provider built on vendors and manual review needs people roughly in step with its volume: more deals, more reviewers, more reconciliation, more servicing. On an integrated stack where agents do the reading, volume grows much faster than the team that runs it.

Illustrative, not to scale. The team a capital provider needs as its funding volume grows: one built on vendors and manual review (grey) and Spring's integrated stack (green). The gap between the curves is value we can pass on in price.

That gap is margin we can return to our customers as better rates, and put back into the stack.

A small team built everything above. You would work directly with the founders, decide what gets built, and own it from design to production.

Further reading