This Firm Helps Founders Raise Capital Without Losing Control

Seamless co-founder Jason Finger unpacks Upper90’s funding model that balances debt and equity.

BY BRIAN CONTRERAS, STAFF WRITER @_B_CONTRERAS_

Jason Finger. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Upper90, Getty Images

When Jason Finger was working on scaling up Seamless—the food delivery platform that hit fourth place on the 2004 Inc. 500 list before eventually merging with GrubHub—he saw firsthand the trade-offs that come with accepting outside investment.

“We raised a little over $2.4 million of equity capital, and many of our competitors raised hundreds of millions of dollars of equity,” says Finger, who co-founded Seamless and served as its chief executive. “As a result, their ownership got meaningfully diluted.”

Since becoming a financier in his post-Seamless career, that experience has shaped his perspective on equity investment.

“The people who do the lion’s share of the work should reap the lion’s share of the reward,” he tells Inc. “But the way that traditional companies get financed, that’s generally not the case.”

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Through Finger’s investment firm, Upper90, he aims to put that ethos into practice. In a bid to help founders capitalize their businesses without losing control, the firm uses a hybrid strategy that combines equity investment with debt offerings. Its targets include a mix of fintechs, synergistic roll-ups and capital-intensive ventures such as robotics startups or data centers; as well as the occasional “special situation,” such as “someone who wanted to buy their business out of a large corporate parent.”

Upper90 emerged from a series of monthly entrepreneurial dinners that Finger used to host in New York City, he explains, and eventually evolved from an investment club into a proper credit fund. In an effort to cut back on portfolio companies’ dilution, the firm generally provides 80 to 90 percent of its capital in the form of credit.

The remaining 10 to 20 percent typically comes in the form of equity—which, Finger says, is meant to align Upper90’s incentives with those of its PortCos.

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