Velocity-linked software company Float has secured $50 million in financing from Silicon Valley Bank to expand its financial services offerings to customers.
The startup, which specializes in full suite corporate expense management software and cards, simplifies finance teams’ management of expense accounting. It serves businesses of up to 500 people, and some of Float’s 3,000-plus corporate clients include Neo Financial, Knix, Clutch and Nerva Energy.
Co-founders Ruslan Nikolaev (BCS ‘20) and Griffin Keglevich says that by raising this capital, the company is positioned to attract more customers by expanding its underwriting capabilities.
“This funding allows us to scale our existing charge card program even further and introduce more customers to Float,” Nikolaev says. “And scaling is critical because we will go beyond serving early-adopters and can serve the broader Canadian economy.”
When Nikolaev and Keglevich met at the University of Waterloo as computer science students, their passion was to build cool things. They joined Velocity in 2019 to work on a company related to computer vision. Soon after, however, they abandoned their original business idea, and started working on the idea that would become Float.
“At Velocity, we went through a good number of ideas until landing on Float,” Keglevich says. “Many have that idealism and cool ideas to work on, but a startup has to give tangible value to the world and that’s what we learned from Velocity — how to validate a problem, figure out how you’re actually going to solve it and then solve it.”
He says learning that customer-first mindset gives them a leg up to innovate corporate spending, an area of financial services that has remained unchanged for decades.
“A lot of companies are stuck with chaotic corporate cards and burdensome finances that take time away from employees and with Float they can make their