Miguel Fernández is co-founder and chief executive of Capchase, which lets software and hardware vendors offer buyers payment terms while the vendor is paid upfront. He came up with it at Harvard Business School, launched it in the middle of the 2020 lockdown, and dropped out when it took off.
Engineering in Madrid and Munich
He grew up in Madrid and studied mechanical engineering there, then took a master's in energy engineering in Munich. After a couple of research internships he decided he would not work as an engineer and joined Monitor Deloitte as a strategy consultant. He was not passionate about consulting, so he started two marketplaces on the side. One made a little money and the other lost some, and he learned mostly by trial and error.
First Salesperson at Geoblink
He left consulting to join Geoblink, a pre-revenue location intelligence software company in Madrid, as its first salesperson. He built its sales and customer success teams, moved to the UK to open the local market, and helped take it past $2 million in annual recurring revenue. In every deal he hit the same problem: how to fund a fast-growing software company without leaning only on venture money.
A Pandemic Start-Up
At Harvard Business School he researched working capital and the cash conversion cycle. In January 2020 the idea for Capchase came together, with two friends from Geoblink, Luis Basagoiti and Ignacio Moreno, and Przemek Gotfryd, a classmate who had been a growth investor. The four first met as a team over Zoom, two in Madrid and two in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They raised a pre-seed round in July 2020 and launched in late August. "It became almost like an instant hit, and then we subsequently dropped out," he said on PitchBook's podcast.
The company later raised more debt and equity and moved into financing purchases between businesses. Originally from Madrid, he has lived in Munich and London and now lives in New York. The cash gap he kept hitting as a salesman became the business he runs.
