FINTECH · BATES · PRE-SEED
Face Card helps freelancers and the small agencies that hire them get paid faster. Every time a freelancer sends an invoice through Face Card, it reminds the client and matches the payment immediately. Freelancers who do not want to wait can take an advance on the invoice and receive the money within two business days.
I spent years waiting months to get paid for work I’d already finished. Freelancers and the small businesses that pay them deserve financial tools built for how they actually work, and that’s what we’re building at Face Card.
Fast Facts
Raise & Stage | Raising a $1.5M Pre-Seed |
Business Model | Fintech: Face Card charges a flat 8% fee on each advance. It has advanced $100K+ to freelancers and handled $460K+ of invoices so far in 2026. |
Team | 1 FTE; 2 contracted |
Customers | 800+ freelancers and 10+ agencies, starting with models, actors and influencers |
Backers | Techstars and Slauson & Co. |
Web |
Liberal Arts Founders
Advisors include Brian Radin, a former president of Corpay, and Kristofer Sommestad, founder and CEO of Willa, a payments company for freelancers.
David Akinyemi, Founder & CEO
BATES ’21
David, a former Bates hooper, started his career as a product manager at Atlassian. While modeling on the side, he lived the problem of slow payments in the creator economy and founded Face Card to fix it. Face Card went through Techstars, and its first users are models, actors, influencers and the agencies that book them.
How it Works
The Face Card app. Reply for the full deck.
A freelancer creates an invoice in Face Card and sends it to the client. Face Card then reminds the client automatically until the invoice is paid. Invoicing is free.
Once an invoice is out, the freelancer can ask for an advance, which Face Card calls Instant Pay. Face Card pays up to 90% of the invoice within one to two business days and charges a flat 8% fee, collected when the client pays. There is no credit check.
When the client’s payment arrives, Face Card matches it to the right invoice and texts the freelancer to confirm. A sample message reads: “We spotted an ACH of $300.00 that matches Invoice #016.”
Agencies see every invoice from their freelancers in one inbox and approve each one there. An agency can also forward a job email to Face Card, which sets up the job, drafts the invoice and sends tax forms and payment setup to each freelancer for the agency to review.
Freelancers have to join Face Card to be paid by an agency that uses it. Face Card says each agency brings 10 to 50 freelancers this way.
Why Now
Freelancers wait months to be paid, and more and more people are freelancing. Face Card estimates that 200M+ freelancers and small businesses are paid 90 or more days late. Skilled freelancers in the US earned $1.5T in 2024, according to Upwork, and at 90 days to payment about $375B of that is owed at any one time. At least 70% of Gen Z has freelanced or thought about it through a tool like Fiverr, according to CNBC.
The agencies that hire freelancers are small and handle payments by hand. Face Card cites Census Bureau data showing that 96% of talent agencies have fewer than 10 people. Its example is a four-person agency that works with 12 brands and 24 freelancers. An agency that size collects from 12 clients and then pays 24 people, usually with no software built for either job. Invoice mistakes and late submissions add to the delay.
Creators are the first market, and they do the marketing. Most brands pay influencers to promote their products. Face Card instead solves a problem those same people have, getting paid on time, so they recommend it because it works for them. Its first users are models, actors and influencers, and its events have drawn 5,000+ paid attendees. Face Card treats creators as the starting point for the wider freelance economy, not the whole opportunity.
Traction
Measure | Figure | Detail |
|---|---|---|
Invoices sent per month | $120K | In August 2026, up from $4K in January; $460K+ in total this year |
Advanced to freelancers | $100K+ | No defaults so far |
Freelancers | 800+ | Along with 10+ agencies |
Instant Pay use | 53% | Face Card puts the industry standard at 30% |
Market Overview
Invoicing and reminders | Advances on unpaid invoices | Built for agencies and their freelancers | |
|---|---|---|---|
Invoicing software | ✓ | – | – |
Invoice factoring | – | ✓ | – |
Agency booking software | ✓ | – | ✓ |
Face Card | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Our Take
WHAT WE LIKE
Agencies bring the freelancers: An agency that uses Face Card needs its freelancers on Face Card to pay them, so one agency sale adds 10 to 50 users without separate marketing. Face Card has 800+ freelancers and 10+ agencies so far.
Free invoicing feeds the product that earns money: Face Card handles the invoice before it advances against it, so it can see how reliably a client pays, which an outside lender cannot. That record helped it secure a $4M debt facility to fund advances, which is rare at the pre-seed stage.
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
Credit risk as advances grow: Advances now come from the debt facility rather than Face Card’s own balance sheet, and Face Card says each one is profitable on invoices with terms of up to 120 days. No defaults on the first $100K is still a small sample for how losses behave at $1M of invoices a month, the 12-month goal for this round.
Reaching freelancers beyond agencies: Face Card sizes signed models, actors and influencers in the US at 160,000 people and $163M a year. Its $9B target covers 8.9M US freelancers who work across several creative jobs, and many of them have no agency to bring them in.
WHY WE FEATURED FACE CARD
We appreciate founders who discover the problem while living it. We’ve also noticed that many successful entrepreneurs have side hustles that become too big to ignore. David discovered food delivery was not good enough to campus in Lewiston, Maine after long nights studying as a physics and mathematics double major and varsity basketball player. He founded Easy Eats LLC food delivery service and grew it to $35K MRR as a Bates student. After speaking with David about Easy Eats and his time at Atlassian, building Face Card into a great company seems like a walk in the park.
Trivium syndicate members will receive our due diligence report and investment terms separately.
Onward,
The Trivium Team
Shared for informational purposes only. Nothing here is investment, legal, or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Company figures are self-reported; market figures are third-party estimates and have not been independently verified.