Katherine McConnell is the Founder and CEO of fintech start-up Brighte, a point of sale credit and payments provider that focuses on funding renewable consumer energy and home improvements. She explains how she used an ansarada data room to raise seed funding for her startup.

“Our recent seed funding raise was very successful and actually closed oversubscribed.

We were raising money whilst Brighte was pre-revenue and pre-launch so it was an interesting dynamic.

We could not have done this level of due diligence without the ansarada data room.

We’re still using the data room because a fast growing lending business will require ongoing access to capital – be it debt or equity – and it appears we will always be fund raising.

We are dealing with professional organisations including banks, mutuals and venture capital funds that require extensive business documentation to be in place and undertake rigorous due diligence.

There are huge benefits to using a data room. It’s the efficiencies and the professionalism. Not to mention the reporting capabilities.

If I did it a second time, I’d definitely use it and use it sooner. I now realise how much time it would save me to direct investors, particularly early stage investors, to our data room instead of liaising with them one-by-one.

There are huge advantages for start-ups in using a data room.

You’re always doing a seed raise or a Series A or a Series B as a start-up.

And as fund raises get larger, the investors also get more sophisticated in their approach and they expect this level of professionalism.”

Katherine McConnell, CEO, Brighte

The first female founder of a lending business in Australia, McConnell self-funded her start-up before her financial advisers KPMG introduced her to ansarada’s data room to present her business professionally to investors and venture capital firms.