Investor pitch deck

Payout

Cash flow built for the way creative agencies actually invoice.

Seed round deck · Q3 2026 · Frederick Sona, founder

Agencies finance their clients for 60 days at a time.

A design shop or consultancy delivers weeks of work, sends the invoice, and waits. Payroll runs on the 15th. Rent hits on the 1st. The client pays on their own terms. The gap is filled by the founder's line of credit or a passed brief.

Sixty-two percent of the 87,000 US agencies with five or more employees report waiting 45 days or longer on paid work. Turning down a lucrative brief because of a slow payer is a familiar bruise for anyone who has run a firm.

Approved invoice today. Cash in the account tomorrow.

Payout advances 90 percent of an approved invoice within 48 hours. The client pays us on their normal terms. The agency stops fronting the money and stops chasing checks.

No UCC filing on the agency's balance sheet. Nothing in the payment portal that reads “factored.” The client experience looks identical to a standard payment link.

$6.6B addressable inside a $220B invoice base.

US agencies with five or more employees bill an estimated $220B a year. Applying a blended 3 percent factoring rate against the invoices we can price puts the addressable market at $6.6B before adjacencies.

Adjacent segments (independent consultants, boutique law firms, architecture practices) share the same invoice pattern and expand the reachable market by roughly 40 percent.

Underwriting on the ledger, not the entity.

Payout underwrites the invoice against the paying client's payment history, then advances the agency in a single click. The stack has three moving parts.

Six months, 84 paying agencies, $19.4M advanced.

Since first advance in March, Payout has grown by word of mouth inside a tight design and consulting network. Net revenue retention across the pilot cohort sits at 138 percent as agencies bring more of their receivables in.

Average agency size 22 employees. Median advance $28,400. Median holding period 34 days.

Flat fee on the advance. No monthly seat cost.

Payout charges 2.4 percent on the advanced amount for a standard 30-day term, sliding to 4.1 percent at 90 days. Net revenue on gross merchandise volume runs 2.9 percent blended, higher on the longer terms our best agencies use for their enterprise clients.

The market splits between legacy factors and generic fintech.

Traditional factoring houses were built for manufacturers moving pallets. They charge 5 to 6 percent, file UCC-1 liens on the agency, and force the client to redirect payment to a lockbox. Founders hate them. Clients ask questions.

Fintech neobanks stop at the checking account. They will lend against revenue but do not underwrite the invoice, which is where an agency's cash actually lives.

Payout is built around the receivable itself: shorter cycles, cleaner client experience, transparent pricing.

An operator, an underwriter, and the person who wrote the risk stack.

Three-person founding team, one hire away from a full leadership bench.

$6M seed to reach 400 accounts and $8M ARR.

Raising $6M at $28M post-money. Lead committed at $2M. The round takes us to 400 paying agencies, $8M ARR, and a Series A story built on repeat behavior instead of promised behavior.

To review the data room, reply to the introduction thread.