Visa and Fundica Collaborate to Help Small Businesses Find Funding

Fundica, a North American funding search engine, has teamed up with Visa to help traditionally underserved small business communities access additional sources of working capital.

Together, Fundica and Visa aim to democratize access to government funding, the companies said in a Monday (March 4) press release.

“Visa and Fundica are both deeply committed to fostering accessibility and inclusion in business communities — making this collaboration a great fit,” Mike Lee, CEO and co-founder of Fundica, said in the release.

The solution enabled by this partnership will help small businesses and entrepreneurs identify government funding and private sector grants that are available and most relevant to them, based on their business profile, needs and situation, according to the release.

It includes comprehensive, up-to-date information about grants, tax credits, government loans and loan guarantees from federal, state/provincial and municipal sources, the release said.

The intelligent solution also ranks these offerings in terms of relevancy to each business, per the release.

“Visa offers the small business community a variety of solutions that deliver value beyond just digital payment solutions,” Sarah Steele, senior director of Visa Small Business Product, said in the release. “We are committed to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs grow by identifying sources of government and other funding solutions, ensuring that underrepresented communities are placed front and center.”

Information about this collaboration is available on pages dedicated to customers in the U.S. as well as those in Canada, in English and in French, according to the release.

In an earlier collaboration, Visa said in August that it teamed up with credit decisioning platform Uplinq to help small businesses access credit.

That collaboration includes Uplinq’s platform that leverages billions of alternative data sets from more than 150 countries, including factors such as market, community and environmental conditions, into its assessments.

Together with Visa’s capabilities, that platform is used in the collaboration to help lenders reduce risk while also giving American and Canadian small business owners access to fair credit.

In February, Visa rolled out new offers of automatic savings and discounts for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), allowing them to unlock new offers.

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