Sanlo is a San Francisco-based startup that offers small to medium-sized game and app companies access to tools to manage their finances and capital to fuel their growth.
The startup was founded in 2020 by CEO Olya Caliujnaia and CTO William Liu. Sanlo gives businesses access to technology, tools and insights to help them achieve their goals. When Sanlo determines that the business could benefit from the deployment of capital, the startup helps by offering financing. Sanlo notes that it is not a VC fund that takes equity in exchange for funding or a lender that charges compounding interest. Sanlo takes no ownership stake in the companies it finances because it is non-dilutive capital.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Caliujnaia said that Sanlo focuses on gaming and app developers. She said that Sanlo is focused on gaming and consumer apps, unlike other companies that are focused on other areas.
Caliujnaia said that they are a technology company, not a fund. It allows us to be transparent about how we work and how we arrive at the products that we build and offer to customers. We are building a full stack of products, not just about growth capital. Developers can use publishers, VCs and banks, but those are usually lengthy and complex.
Sanlo asks companies for certain types of data, including product data about how well the app or game monetizes. Sanlo gets information about customer acquisition and retention, as well as marketing data and a subset of financial data. The company's growth trajectory is continually monitored by its predictive algorithms to identify where and how the business can grow. Sanlo gives companies access to capital.
Sanlo is the image.
Sanlo will use the new funding to create more products for developers and to bring on more people to grow its team, according to Caliujnaia.
The plan is to build out more products and the team. We need passionate people to help us build better and faster. We are open to talented people in other places around the world, even if they are primary in North America.
Existing investors in the funding round included Initial Capital, Portag3 Venture, and London Venture Partners. A number of angel investors and new investors participated in the funding round. Sanlo received Series A funding a year after it received $3.5 million in seed funding.
Sanlo and HCGFunds have joined forces to provide funding to the developers it works with, as part of the funding announcement.
Sanlo has worked with dozens of companies over the past year. Caliujnaia said the company carefully selects businesses to work with and regularly checks in with them to allow for close collaboration. Sanlo says it helped a large game publisher that was looking to consolidate and gain visibility into cash flows from multiple platforms. The company helped a developer that wanted to bring economy designers on board to tighten monetization. Sanlo helped another game developer who was looking for predictable non-dilutive capital to finance the development of their expanding portfolio of games.
Sanlo raises $3.5M to help apps and games gain access to financial insights and capital
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