Tangible simplifies structured debt for hardtech startups

I recently had coffee with friends building a robot chef. When the conversation moved from the demo to the budget, the numbers stopped being fun very quickly. Most of the money was not for growth. It was for metal, motors, sensors, and production.

Fintech of my choice: Tangible

Tangible is a structured debt platform built for hardtech. Not for another app with free cards, but for cleantech, robotics, and deep-tech teams that need real capital to build real things.

The company is based in London and raised a $4.3M seed round led by Pale Blue Dot, with MMC, Future Positive Capital, Unruly, SDAC, Prototype Capital, and Aperture also in the round. They are a small team, 13 people, but they already have relationships with 28 banks.

The co-founders are William Godfrey (CEO), Aishwarya Dahanukar (CCO), and Sebastian Abdy Sabouné (CPO). Their angle is simple and very practical. They automate the parts of structured debt that waste time and kill deals: diligence, documentation, and reporting. If you can shorten underwriting and reduce the cost of doing the deal, you unlock more “yes” decisions from lenders and more usable options for founders.

The business model is also refreshingly straightforward. Tangible makes money on origination and servicing fees. That fits the market. When you finance physical assets and factories-in-the-making, the work does not end at signing. Lenders want clean reporting, and borrowers need a predictable process.

I have been in fintech for more than a decade, and I have watched the same pattern repeat across products and geographies. Equity is great for software speed. But hardware is a different animal. Governments are pushing industrial policy, and hardware startups are booming again. In that world, non-dilutive capital is not a “nice to have”. It can be the difference between shipping a pilot and shutting down.

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I would love to see structured debt become normal earlier in a hardtech company’s life, not only when the factory is already built. Next time I talk to a hardware founder in Portugal, I will ask a different question: what would you build if the financing timeline were measured in weeks, not months?

Which emerging industries do you think most need new financing tools beyond venture equity right now: robotics, climate hardware, biotech manufacturing, or something else?

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