A black led Fintech Lendtable raised $18 million in Serie A funding

Mitchell Jones and Sheridan Clayborne are both black and they are in charge of running Lendtable, a fintech startup that helps with 401 k matching for employees that don’t have money in hand to contribute to their 401 k retirement program.  

The black-led fintech company raised money to further their business growth and the round was led by O1 advisor, Softbank’s SB Opportunity Fund, Valor Equity Partners, and other participants.

Both Mitchell Jones and Sheridan Clayborne started their career at Dropbox, they were product managers before leaving to start Lendtable.

How does LendTable work?

Lendtable will offer cash advances to allow employees to take full advantage of their 401(k) match all at once without needing to use any of their own money. Once their money has been vested, the San Francisco-based startup takes a portion of the profit earned.

“I’m obsessed with trying to help people save and invest their money. I come from a lower-middle-income Black community in Dayton, Ohio,” Jones

“I really, really tried to figure out how they were saving and investing their money. And I insisted that they show me kind of what they were saving in. And all their money was in checking accounts,” Jones explained to AfroTech. “This was more than 10 years ago now. And it just lit a fire under me. I was like, my parents are not going to be able to retire even though they’ve been saving for 20 years and have been working really hard. And I thought that was broken.”

“I ended up starting this hedge fund that bought and sold sneakers, tickets and apparel. By the time I was 18, we scaled it up to $25 million in revenue,” Clayborne explained to AfroTech.

According to Clayborne, by 17-years-old, he had made his first one million dollars, but didn’t know what to do next.

“From there when I was 17, I was a quant trader at JPMorgan. When I was 18, I was the youngest person to work on the Goldman Sachs Special Situations Group. And I just got to see all these different things and private equity and venture capital and how all these billionaires were making like 30, 40, 50 percent year over year returns,” Clayborne said. “But it was a really eye-opening experience because no one I’ve ever known had actually taken advantage of any of those assets. All these billionaires were able to do all this financial maneuvering, averaging, to make all these outsized returns, but regular people never actually had access to those asset classes.”

According to the press release, Lendtable already disbursed $2.4 million in match benefits to employees at a wide range of companies from small consumer brand companies to powerhouses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. The press release also indicated that, in early 2021, Lendtable partnered with Kitu Life Inc., the maker of keto protein brand Super Coffee, to help all of their employees max out their 401(k) contributions.

“Within as little as two weeks, Lendtable decreased the amount of Super Coffee employees not using their full 401(k) benefits by 15%,” the press release stated.