The backstory
Webshare is the technology leader in lawful-use enterprise proxy services, enabling deep data collection, aggregation, and analysis for businesses across the globe.
In a nutshell: they’re one of the leading proxy providers online.
And they’ve got some pretty impressive milestones under their belt too, with >100,000 activated users, 10,000 active customers, and 250 billion monthly proxy requests, business from Fortune 500 companies to consultants rely on Webshare to get things done.
Even more impressive, they've taken a bootstrapped approach to their funding since inception.
We sat down with Founder and CEO Utku Zihnioglu to hear about his journey with Capchase, and how revenue-based financing allowed them to scale yet stay in control.
The funding dilemma
“If you go down the VC route, you become a professional fundraiser at the end of the day. I don’t want to raise money if I don’t have to.” - Utku Zihnioglu, Founder and CEO, Webshare
Utku and his team were looking for cash. First of all, they spent some time looking into bank loans, but were put off by the amount of administrative tasks needed to be considered eligible, including demoing, spending a lot of time contacting the bank, and hefty paperwork.
He felt they were being asked to jump through hoops.
On top of this, the banks required him to provide a thorough plan of what the money was going to be spent on, asking him to predict exactly where his business would be in the future.
“If I say marketing today, it might be engineering tomorrow. We don't want to be restricted on how we spend our money. That creates a conflict to banks' terms, and so loans were out of the question.”
Utku found that the rigidity in the loan structure wasn’t going to work for a business in the stage that Webshare was at the time.
He researched debt financing options, but these had crazy high interest rates. Again, not ideal for an entrepreneur choosing the bootstrapped track.
A self-serve solution
Everything at Webshare is self-service and self-onboarding. So it was a natural fit when Webshare eventually found Capchase - a funding option designed with the same ethos: founders know best how to run their business: remove the barriers and let them get to work.
“With Capchase, we spend maybe four hours over email in total. That was it.”
Utku worked with Capchase to set up a capital draw based on the company’s future predictable revenue and overall business health. The draw terms worked perfectly for them because they use it as a credit line, drawing in small, predictable chunks. The deciding factor for Utku was the rates and the terms. Within 48 hours, Webshare had a rate presented to them which made it easy to get started.
In addition to using Capchase Grow, Utku further lowered the cost of his growth capital by parking his idle cash into a Capchase Earn account. This account offers a 3.00% return and is a smarter alternative to storing cash in a bank account that generates next-to-nothing. Combining Capchase Grow for draws and Capchase Earn for parking his idle funds allowed him to access low-cost, efficient capital unlike anywhere else in the market.
Capchase Earn gives us the flexibility to make our original revenue financing capital a little bit cheaper which is a big benefit for us. It means we can extend our runway that little bit longer.
Learn about Capchase Earn.
To learn more about Webshare, visit www.webshare.io
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