Which funding products does this apply to?

Merchant Cash Advance, Working Capital, SBA Loan, Equipment Financing, Invoice Financing, Revenue-Based Financing, Business Credit Cards. Each has its own page listing the funders in this directory that offer it and what each one publishes about its terms.

Are the figures here quotes?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What a particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it at all.

The Find Me Funders research desk. Some drafting is AI-assisted, and every page that is says so at the top, including whether a person has checked its claims yet.

How do I know a figure here is right?

Where a page carries the green notice, its claims were checked against the sources listed at the end and a reviewer is named. Where it carries the amber one, nobody has verified it yet and you should confirm anything you plan to act on.

Are the examples real deals?

No. Every worked example is labelled illustrative and exists to show the arithmetic. What any particular lender charges is on that lender's page, where it publishes it.

Why do you never say what a typical rate is?

Because we cannot source it. A market average assembled from lenders who do not publish prices is a guess with a decimal point on it. Where a lender publishes a figure, we show that figure and say where it came from.

Is this financial or legal advice?

No. It is general information about how these products work. Outcomes depend on your contract and your state, and a lawyer or accountant licensed where you are is the person to ask about your situation.

Can I reuse this content?

Quote a paragraph with a link back. Do not republish whole articles.

Funding for a Business Under Six Months Old: What Exists

What funding actually exists for a business under six months old

Most of the market underwrites a deposit history you do not have yet. The products that remain underwrite something else — an asset, a customer, a platform, or you.

By Find Me Funders research desk Updated 14 September 2026 913 words 4 min read

Drafted with AI assistance. Not yet independently checked. Nobody has verified the claims on this page against a source, so treat the figures and legal points as a starting point rather than as settled, and confirm anything you are about to act on. How we check things.

The mechanical reason the market narrows

Most non-bank small-business funding is underwritten from bank statements. Deposits in, debits out, balance behaviour, existing obligations. That model needs a run of months to read, and a business with two months of statements has produced two data points, one of which is probably an opening month that looks nothing like the steady state.

This is not a judgement about young businesses. It is that the primary underwriting input does not exist yet. Which tells you where to look: at products that underwrite something other than your deposit history.

What underwrites a customer instead of you

Invoice factoring.You sell an unpaid invoice at a discount, and the credit decision is mostly about whether the account debtor — your customer — pays their bills. A four-month-old staffing agency invoicing a large hospital system is a very different application from a four-month-old business invoicing nobody. Business age still gets looked at, because a factor also cares whether the work was actually performed and whether you will still exist to service the account, but it is a secondary question. See how invoice factoring works and can I factor a single invoice.

Purchase order financing.Sits upstream of factoring, funding the cost of goods against a confirmed order. It needs a real order from a creditworthy buyer and a supplier chain that can be paid directly.

Both of these are the honest answer to "we have contracts but no history". They convert a customer's creditworthiness into your working capital.

What underwrites an asset

Equipment financing.The machine, truck or system secures the transaction, and repossession value does some of the work that history usually does. New businesses face tighter terms — larger deposits, shorter terms, a stronger guarantee, sometimes a second guarantor — but the channel is open, and titled equipment with a resale market is the easiest case. See equipment financing for a new business and can I lease equipment with bad credit.

A vendor programme.The manufacturer or dealer arranges the financing through its own captive or partner. Their appetite is shaped by wanting the sale, which occasionally reaches further than a standalone lessor would.

What underwrites a platform record

If your sales run through a payment processor, a marketplace or an e-commerce platform, that operator can see a sales history it trusts more than a bank statement, and it controls the repayment channel because the money passes through it. Products of this kind are typically sized against observed volume, and some are available on a shorter history than an independent funder would accept. See funding offered by the platform that processes your sales.

The trade-off is concentration: the entity funding you also holds your revenue stream and can adjust the withholding.

What underwrites you personally

A business credit card.Usually decided on the owner's consumer credit with a personal guarantee, and among the few reported instruments a very young business can obtain. Expensive as working capital and useful as a bridge — see using a business credit card to cover a cash flow gap.

Personal borrowing put into the business.Straightforward and unforgiving. The debt is yours whatever happens to the company, and it removes the separation that the entity was created to provide.

Owner equity, friends and family.Not a funding product, but it is the actual source of most early-stage small-business capital, and it is what an SBA lender will expect to see as an equity injection.

The SBA question at this stage

SBA programmes are not closed to new businesses, and the microloan programme in particular runs through intermediary lenders with their own criteria and a mission focus. What SBA channels require instead of history is documentation: projections with support, an equity injection, collateral where available, and a credit memo an intermediary can defend. Speed is not their strength. See can a startup get an SBA loan and the SBA microloan programme, plus sba.gov for the programme rules themselves.

What mostly is not available yet

Say it plainly, because a broker may not. Merchant cash advances, revenue-based financing and short-term working capital loans are deposit-driven products, and most funders in those categories set a minimum trading history. A few operate at the short end. The offers you will be shown there tend to be small, priced hard, and structured with daily remittance.

And a warning specific to this stage: businesses with no history and urgent need attract advance-fee scams. Nobody legitimate requires a fee paid to an individual before an offer exists. An application fee disclosed in writing on a term sheet is one thing; a wire to secure an approval is another.

What to do with the months you have

Open the business bank account in the exact legal name and run everything through it. The account opening date is an anchor several funders use.
Keep personal and business money apart from day one. Mixed accounts are the most common reason a young file cannot be underwritten at all.
Preserve predecessor evidence — sole-prop tax returns, prior statements, a licence with an earlier date.
Get the D-U-N-S number and open two or three supplier accounts that report. See building business credit from zero.
Fix the personal file, because at this stage it is carrying most of the weight.

Six months of clean, boring, single-account statements is worth more at month seven than any amount of preparation done at month seven.

Where this applies