White Star Capital

Coming out of stealth today, I’m building Sugar (@usesugar) which solves fintech’s biggest pain point: liquidity for pre-funding and reserves. Fintech’s biggest secret is: in order for customers to move money, the fintech they use needs to pre-fund payments so that their payments go through. Sugar solves that pain by providing liquidity in an API, or as a line of credit in USD, USDC, USDT. Some popular cases we help solve in fiat and stables: - Pre funding payments on/off chain - Collateral requirements and escrow - Sponsor bank requirements - Credit reserves The problem: While most SMB segments are well served for credit, fintechs are deeply underserved as there isn’t a credit product designed for fintech’s pre-funding and reserve capital needs, because they did not exist at this scale until a few years ago. Sugar helps finance those fintechs so that they can scale their payments or credit business, while diluting less and not having to face delays in growth or interruptions of service. Sugar doesn’t require you to change your payment processor, bank sponsor, payout provider, or on/off ramp infrastructure. We want to unlock your liquidity to help increase scale. How do we do it: volume based underwriting. We’ve pioneered what we call Volume Based Underwriting, where we underwrite fintechs based on their volumes enabling us to understand a fintech’s growth, volatility, and fraud in order to offer them liquidity. Why now. Fintech's first two waves. - Wave one moved banking online through mobile and desktop apps, digital KYC, and payments. The neobanks launching in 2026 still do the same. - Wave two is payments plus credit. Neobanks have to differentiate, and credit is how the hundreds launching today will win customers. - All of them will need liquidity for pre-funding, reserves, collateral, and warehouse lending. We want to be that lender. Our master plan: - Customer experience: Make getting liquidity an easy experience for fintechs. Who provides the best experience wins. - Cost of capital: Develop a loan book and re-finance with each balance sheet milestone with lower cost lenders, from banks, M&A, and DeFi. The lowest cost of capital wins. - Going vertical: Launch verticals that compliment and strengthen the core credit thesis. Rinse and repeat. If you’re a fintech founder, CFO, or someone in finance and you’re looking to solve your pre-funding or reserve needs, send me a DM. Thanks to the team at @WhiteStarCap and @alliance for supporting us early in our journey. PS, For friends that knew of us before today, we are rebranding away from Superbank.