Through our flagship fund Advance, we make commercial loans* of $100,000 to $500,000 to tenacious small businesses and nonprofits in San Diego that are committed to advancing economic opportunity, but find themselves in a capital gap. We look for “tweens“—businesses that don’t fit SBA, microloan, or bank criteria—where our investment will be the tipping point enabling a project to succeed. Our team analyzes all borrowers for alignment across impact, management, and finance.
Borrow
Mission Driven Finance helps nonprofits, social enterprises, and businesses grow with accessible and affordable impact-based financing. We fund and leverage capital to advance economic opportunity and empower communities.
Our Lending Focus
Impact
We take a systems approach to economic opportunity and look at three key themes: organizations that prepare people for success through access to healthcare, housing, and education; businesses that directly provide quality jobs, hire from their communities, and support employee development; and systems and infrastructure that allow more people to participate in a positive growing economy.
Management
We seek tenacious, coachable borrowers with a deep commitment to advancing economic opportunity. We look for individuals and teams who actively participate in their community as this positions them for greater impact and financial viability in their chosen market. By and large, our borrowers’ businesses are service-oriented where the management’s trustworthiness and community reputation sustains their growth.
Finance
Our borrowers are post-revenue and typically in one of these three capital gaps:- Uncommon receivable, such as government reimbursement, long lag time, and other difficult to factor revenue sources.
- Existing cashflow covers debt service, but some factor keeps them from qualifying for other capital. These can include a mismatch of investment size, insufficient operating history, or personal credit score. We will also refinance high-cost capital when the borrower can show how their reinvested cost savings will drive economic opportunity.
- One-time hurdle where they have demonstrated demand but high fixed costs to be able to fulfill it. After getting over this hurdle, they will have stronger impact and financial viability.
Tipping Point
We take pride in our flexibility and adaptability to fill gaps in funding, providing additional capital needed to allow a project to proceed or unlocking critical co-investments, in addition to facilitating complex transaction structuring.
*Mission Driven Finance also offers transactions structured in accordance with Islamic financing principles.
Mission Driven Finance is committed to upholding transparent and fair lending practices as a signatory of the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights.