How Immediate Raised $10M Without Institutional Investors—And Why That Mattered

Most founders chase institutional capital from day one. Term sheets from Sequoia or a16z become status symbols. The thinking goes: if tier-one VCs validate your vision, customers and talent will follow.

Matt Pierce took a different path. He raised nearly $10 million in equity for Immediate almost entirely from high net worth individuals and family offices. No big-name institutional investors. No splashy TechCrunch funding announcements. Just mission-aligned capital from people who believed in the problem he was solving.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Pierce, CEO and Founder of Immediate, shared why this unconventional fundraising strategy gave his financial wellness platform something institutional investors couldn’t provide: the patience to find product-market fit before scaling.

The Mission as Filter

Most founders position their mission as a marketing tool. Matt used it as an investor filter.

“Our mission is to positively impact the financial well being of a million Americans by the end of 2024,” Matt explains. This wasn’t aspirational language for the website—it was the screening mechanism for capital.

“When we go in and we sit down with potential investors or existing investors and we talk to them about that and the track that we’re on and the path that we’re headed down, people that align with that mission and want to be a part of this are ones that we typically lean towards,” Matt continues.

This approach flipped the traditional founder-investor dynamic. Instead of optimizing pitch decks for maximum investor appeal, Matt used investor conversations to evaluate alignment. The question wasn’t “will they fund us?” but “do they actually care about financial wellness for American workers?”

Family offices and high net worth individuals who’d built businesses or accumulated wealth often have personal connections to the problem. They remember paycheck-to-paycheck living. They’ve employed hourly workers. They understand the human cost of financial stress in ways that institutional investors—optimizing for fund returns across dozens of portfolio companies—might not.

The Capital Structure That Enabled Discovery

Immediate’s fundraising timeline reveals strategic patience. The company spent its first year—from September 2018 to September 2019—jumping through legal and regulatory hurdles before landing their first customer. No revenue. Just compliance work, platform development, and proof of concept.

Then came another year of intentional market discovery, taking any customer willing to sign to gather data on enrollment patterns and vertical fit. Still no massive scale. Just systematic learning.

Only after identifying that healthcare and hospitality showed 2-3x higher enrollment rates did Immediate begin focused scaling. That’s roughly two years from founding before the core GTM strategy crystallized.

“The capital markets for us are where we’ve typically received investment from in the past has been high net worth individuals and family offices,” Matt notes. “We have one or two institutional investors that sit on our cap table. But all of these investors have been people that come alongside us and believe in our mission, and they want to be a part of this.”

That patient capital structure made the discovery phase possible. Institutional investors managing other people’s money face quarterly reporting, fund timelines, and portfolio pressure. A company spending two years finding product-market fit raises questions. A mission-aligned individual investor? They’re often building alongside you.

The Debt Strategy for Operating Capital

Beyond equity, Immediate’s capital structure includes a sophisticated debt component that reveals operational sophistication.

“When you layer in some of the debt that we’ve raised, debt for us is what we use to put money out into market,” Matt explains. “So if you came in today and said, I need $100. We actually fund your account with that and then are getting reimbursed through your standard payroll process.”

This debt facility—now exceeding $20 million in available capital—serves a specific operational purpose. It’s not growth capital or runway extension. It’s working capital for the core business model: funding employee wage access that gets repaid through payroll.

“We continue to have success there. We’ve got opportunities to continue to expand that,” Matt notes. “I think our actual access to capital is north of 20 million now from a debt perspective.”

The separation of equity (for building the business) and debt (for operating the business) demonstrates capital sophistication that benefits from experienced individual investors who understand different capital types serve different purposes.

The Advantages of Non-Institutional Capital

Immediate’s approach created three strategic advantages that institutional capital would have complicated:

Advantage One: Time to Find True Product-Market Fit

With nearly $10 million in equity from aligned investors, Immediate could afford to spend a year in market discovery. “In the first year or so of selling, we really took anything, right?” Matt recalls. “Let’s just figure out what makes sense and let’s make sure that we’ve got a scalable platform in place.”

Institutional investors managing fund timelines often push for faster scaling decisions. The pressure to show growth quarter-over-quarter can force premature ICP selection or scaling before unit economics prove out. Mission-aligned individuals betting their own capital? They’re often more patient with the discovery process if they believe in the ultimate impact.

Advantage Two: Geographic Flexibility

Immediate relocated from Atlanta to Birmingham—a move that would raise eyebrows in institutional investor meetings. “We moved here because we wanted to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond,” Matt explains.

That decision to prioritize team stability and cultural fit over proximity to capital worked because Immediate’s investors cared about the mission outcome, not the optics of being in a major tech hub. The resulting zero customer churn—”hundreds and hundreds of customers, we haven’t lost a single customer,” Matt emphasizes—proved the geographic strategy right.

Advantage Three: Mission Consistency in Product Decisions

When 87% of your users earn less than $60,000 annually, product decisions get complex. The highest-revenue customers might not be the highest-impact users. Features that improve unit economics might not serve the mission.

Mission-aligned investors provide cover for decisions that optimize for impact alongside returns. This alignment becomes crucial when choosing between paths that maximize ARR growth versus paths that maximize financial wellness outcomes for vulnerable workers.

The Transition to Institutional Capital

Here’s what makes Immediate’s strategy particularly sophisticated: they’re not avoiding institutional investors permanently. They’re timing the transition strategically.

“At some point in 2023, we’ll be going out to do a larger institutional raise from an equity perspective, to continue to pour gas on the fire and keep growing at the rates that we’re growing at,” Matt shares.

The timing is deliberate. Immediate now has:

• Six figures of eligible employees
• 60 deals closed in the past 100 days
• 24% average enrollment with target verticals at 25-35%
• Zero customer churn across hundreds of employers
• Proven unit economics in healthcare and hospitality

They’re pursuing institutional capital from a position of strength, with validated product-market fit and clear growth trajectory. The terms will be better. The dilution will be less painful. The strategic value institutional investors bring—network effects, category expertise, follow-on funding capacity—becomes more valuable now than it would have been at founding.

The Framework for Mission-Aligned Fundraising

Immediate’s experience suggests principles other founders can apply:

Start with Mission Clarity. Your mission can’t be vague purpose-washing. It needs to be specific enough to filter investors. “Positively impact the financial well being of a million Americans by the end of 2024” is concrete. “Make the world better through technology” is not.

Identify Investors with Personal Connection to the Problem. Family offices and high net worth individuals often have direct experience with the problems you’re solving—as former employees, business owners, or people who’ve lived the customer experience. That personal connection creates alignment no pitch deck can manufacture.

Separate Discovery Capital from Scaling Capital. Use patient, mission-aligned capital for the discovery phase. Pursue institutional capital once you’ve proven the model and need growth capital. The institutional value-add (network, expertise, follow-on capacity) matters more at scale than at inception.

Build Debt Facilities for Operating Capital. If your business model requires working capital (like funding wage access), separate that from equity raises. Debt facilities aligned with unit economics can provide operational funding without dilution.

Time Institutional Raises for Leverage. Immediate is raising institutional capital after proving six figures of users and zero churn. That leverage creates better terms and less dilution than raising institutional capital to prove the concept.

When Patient Capital Compounds

Four years after founding, Immediate serves six figures of eligible employees with zero churn. They’re closing 60 deals per quarter. They’re positioned to capture share in a market moving from 15% to near-universal penetration.

None of that required Sequoia’s brand at seed stage. It required investors who cared about the mission enough to be patient through discovery, flexible about geography, and aligned on optimizing for impact alongside returns.

The story most founders hear is: raise from the best investors possible as early as possible. The story Immediate tells is different: raise from the right investors at the right time, and use mission alignment as your filter.

Sometimes the capital that believes in you matters more than the capital that impresses others.