Alternative financing startup Pipe snaps up Stripe and HubSpot execs, expands to UK

Pipe, a two-year-old startup that aims to be the Nasdaq for revenue," announced today it has snagged former Stripe EIC Sid Orlando and HubSpot's ex-Chief Strategy Officer Brad Coffey to serve on its executive team.

The Miami-based fintech also revealed today its first expansion outside of the United States with its entry into the U.K. market.

It's been a good year for Pipe. The buzzy startup has raised $300 million in equity financing this year from a slew of investors, such as Shopify, Slack, Okta, HubSpot, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, Chamath Palihapitiya, MaC Ventures, Fin VC, Greenspring Associates and Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), among others.

Since its public launch in June 2020, over 8,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform. That's double from the reported over 4,000" that had signed up at the time of the company's last raise in May - a $250 million round that valued the company at $2 billion.

More funding flows into Pipe, as buzzy fintech raises $250M at a $2B valuation

Orlando has left her role as editor-in-chief of fintech giant Stripe, where she has worked for over four years, to head up content for Pipe. She was also previously manager of curation and content at Kickstarter. Coffey left HubSpot - where he worked for over 13 years and most recently served as chief strategy officer for nearly 5 - to serve as Pipe's chief customer officer, where he will be responsible for driving continued growth and expansion of verticals beyond Pipe's initial launch market of SaaS. Coffey was one of HubSpot's first employees and witnessed the progression of the company from a startup with $1 million in ARR to a publicly traded company with $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

CEO Harry Hurst, Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia founded Pipe in September 2019 with the mission of giving SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. (Pipe describes its buy-side participants as a vetted group of financial institutions and banks.")

The goal of the platform is to offer companies with recurring revenue streams access to capital so they don't dilute their ownership by accepting external capital or get forced to take out loans.

Pipe's platform has evolved to offer non-dilutive capital to non-SaaS companies as well. In fact, today over 50% of the companies using its platform are non-SaaS companies, compared to 25% in May.

Notably, Coffey led HubSpot's investment into Pipe last spring and that's how he first became familiar with the company.

When I first came across Pipe, I realized they had the opportunity to be a company that not only transforms but also helps a generation of founders get access to the growth capital they've never had access to at scale before," he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. This was even more obvious when I led HubSpot's investment in Pipe...where HubSpot provides the software and education, and Pipe can provide the capital. As I got to know the founders and the team through that process, I realized it was an opportunity I didn't want to miss and had to be a part of."

Orlando expressed similar sentiments around her decision to join the company.

Pipe has such an intriguing opportunity to recontour aspects of the funding landscape, providing alternative financing option to founders looking to grow and scale companies on their own terms," she wrote via email. Being a part of the early team to build such an impactful product in the market was no doubt a compelling mandate! I'm also struck by Pipe's team and mission, of pursuing the ambitious vision for leveraging a new asset class with both humility and immense motivation, in service of greater flexibility, agency, equitability and growth opportunities for founders and their teams."

For Pipe's Hurst, the new hires signal a new chapter for the company, which continues to grow at a rapid rate.

There are lots of days on Pipe where tens of millions [of dollars] are traded in a single day. Tens of millions of dollars were being traded every month last time we spoke [in May], he told TechCrunch. And it's across a diversified set of customers and different verticals. We are even increasingly helping finance M&As. Growth has been explosive."

Tradable annual recurring revenue (ARR) on the Pipe platform is in excess of $2 billion and trending toward $3 billion, according to Hurst.

The company's expansion into the United Kingdom is significant because while the region has a growing venture ecosystem, capital is not nearly as available to founders as it is in the U.S. Pipe's availability in the region will give those founders an alternative means of financing, Hurst believes.

There are a lot of fundamentally healthy companies that don't have access to financing, period," he told TechCrunch. So we believe in the U.K., Pipe will be incredibly impactful and that is evidenced from what we've seen already."

The move also represents a return to the CEO's roots.

I left the U.K. for the United States seven years ago as it provided the best funding environment to build my first technology company, and it is enormously gratifying to bring those same opportunities to the burgeoning ecosystem of technology companies in the U.K.," he said. If Pipe existed a decade ago and offered company friendly financing options, I might never have left the U.K. ... Now, I'm bringing it home and really excited to be launching in the U.K."

With the move, Pipe has opened a microhub in London and 10% of its 55-person team will be based there.