Fintech startup BlueVine Capital, Inc. has raised $40 million Series C in a round led by Menlo Ventures that included Rakuten FinTech Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, 83North, Correlation Ventures and a new debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank.

Founded in 2013, BlueVine offers an invoice factoring service that aims to help small businesses overcome short-term cash flow challenges.

The company provides the ability for small to medium enterprises to bridge the cash gap between the invoicing of a product, and payment on those invoices, meaning that they do not need to wait for a payment on net 30 or 60-day terms.

“As a business owner, getting paid quickly for your product or service is always a priority,” BlueVine explains. “At the same time, your customers require time to make their payment, sometimes as long as 90 days.”

“We started BlueVine with two things in mind: first, to eliminate this cash flow gap so you don’t have to worry about making payroll or being able to buy more inventory, and second, to eliminate the long wait, paperwork, and hidden fees that business owners deal with at other financial institutions.”

The service is 100 percent online, takes around two minutes to sign up, and funds are usually available to customers with one working day.

“We are disrupting a very very old industry called invoice factoring,” BlueVine Chief Executive Officer and Founder Eyal Lifshitz told TechCrunch. “They do million dollar loans all day but when you’re talking about sub $250,000, banks really don’t like that.”

Timing

The move to raise capital by BlueVine, which by its very nature caters to a more high-risk market than those serviced by traditional banks, is fortuitous timing given that it would appear that venture capital is starting to slow after evidence mounts that the peak of the second great tech bubble is now in the past.

Of particular interest is the fact that the company may have raised the round for that very reason, that is to build up a nest egg in case venture capital starts to either dry up, or become far more difficult to obtain, with Lifshitz telling Forbes that the company is awash in cash: “We have not even spent half the amount we previously raised,” she noted.

Including the new round BlueVine has raised $64 million to date.

The company said it would use the new funds to expand its customer base.

Image credit: BlueVine/screenshot