Small businesses run on software. Increasingly, they also run on capital.
Vertical SaaS platforms sit at the centre of that relationship. They see the cash flows. They understand the operating cycles. They know when their customers are growing—and when a lack of capital is holding them back. Yet most platforms still send those customers elsewhere when financing is needed. Not because they want to. Because building lending is hard.
In Canada, it’s still harder. Regulation is fragmented. Infrastructure is thin. And the cost of doing it right is high enough that only the largest platforms ever try. The result is a persistent gap between what platforms could offer and what small businesses actually get. This results in lost revenues for platforms and makes it more burdensome for SMEs to obtain capital.
A team uniquely positioned to tackle the challenge
Slate’s founders, Scott Elliot and Devin Picciolini, didn’t arrive at this insight theoretically. They lived it. At Keep, they built and scaled lending products from the inside. Shipping underwriting systems, navigating compliance, securing bank partnerships, and learning firsthand how much organizational energy it takes to run lending as a side business. It worked. But it was painful. And it was obvious that most platforms would never attempt it themselves.
That experience shaped Slate’s starting point. Instead of asking platforms to become lenders, Slate lets them stay platforms. The product is infrastructure: underwriting, compliance, servicing, and capital orchestration delivered as a white-label layer that feels native inside the software SMEs already use. No mutil-year build. No large internal team. Just lending that shows up where it’s contextually relevant and data-informed.
What makes Slate non-obvious is not the ambition, but the sequencing. This is not a generic fintech stack repackaged for Canada. It is Canada-first by design—built around local regulatory realities, local capital partners, and the kinds of vertical data Canadian platforms actually have. It treats lending as an orchestration problem, not a balance-sheet one, and uses platform data rather than borrower desperation as the foundation for underwriting.
Embedded lending has exited before. The execution has not.
Scott and Devin have already built what they’re building again. They understand where lending breaks at scale, and where it compounds. That lived experience shows up in the product decisions and the speed of execution.
They understand that embedded lending for vertical SaaS in Canada is a real gap, not a crowded category. Platforms want fintech revenue. SMEs want faster, more contextual access to capital. Slate sits between them and understands how to build a product that works for all parties, is embedded correctly and provides high margin revenue for the platforms they partner with.
Looking to better serve your customers?
We believe Slate has the chance to become the default lending layer for Canadian vertical SaaS and led their pre-seed round with participation from North Exit. If you run a SaaS company and want to offer a lending solution to your customers, reach out to the Slate team here.
