Slate raises $1.3 million to deliver embedded lending infrastructure to Canadian platforms

Slate has closed $1.3 million CAD in pre-seed funding from Toronto’s N49P and North Exit Ventures to build embedded lending infrastructure, the company announced last week. The round, which was raised via a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), closed earlier this month, supported by undisclosed strategic angels.

Founded in late 2025 by CEO Scott Elliot and CTO Devin Picciolini, Slate aims to allow any Canadian platform to offer embedded lending to their small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers “without the complexity of building and managing lending infrastructure.” 

“Access to lending and cash flow was always the bottleneck, and it never fit how businesses actually operate.”

The Vancouver FinTech startup has spent the past several months developing “an enterprise-grade lending platform,” which Elliot told BetaKit is now live. The startup plans to invest its funding in product development, underwriting and risk infrastructure, and establishing regulatory and compliance foundations as it looks to double its six-person team.

Elliot and Picciolini have spent years working with SMBs and the platforms that serve them. “The same pattern kept showing up,” Elliot wrote on LinkedIn. “Access to lending and cash flow was always the bottleneck, and it never fit how businesses actually operate.”

Prior to Slate, Elliot served in risk and compliance roles at foreign FinTech firms like Airwallex and Brex, while Picciolini worked in product roles at Groupon and Meta, ran venture studio Coral Lab, and co-founded and exited virtual dental startup Dr. H. & Co. Their paths crossed at Toronto-based Keep, which is building a Canadian small-business banking platform.

Traditionally, Elliot wrote, companies that want to offer loans to businesses through their existing platforms, from their marketplaces to vertical software products, have needed to build “everything from scratch,” including capital, underwriting, compliance, risk, and operations. Slate says this process can take 12 to 18 months.

“It’s slow, expensive, and the economics rarely work unless lending becomes the core business,” Elliot wrote. “As a result, most platforms either don’t offer financing at all, or are forced into models that don’t align with how their customers actually operate.”

Slate hopes to help change that for vertical software-as-a-service companies, payments and FinTech platforms, and tech providers that serve SMBs.

As North Exit Ventures co-founder and general partner Tal Schwartz noted in his Canadian FinTech Newsletter, the startup’s model relies on underwriting, funding, and servicing the loans in a way that “feels like it’s coming from the platform.” Schwartz wrote that he is bullish on Slate’s approach, given its low customer acquisition cost and access to proprietary underwriting data.

Hanna Zaidi, VP of payments strategy and chief compliance officer at Wealthsimple, is advising Slate. (Zaidi is also a member of BetaKit’s board of directors.)

Over the past decade, FinTech companies like Wise, Brex, Chime, and Robinhood have grown by solving specific pain points particularly well. But today, Vangwe co-founder and CEO Agustín Guerra argued in Forbes that the market is entering a “rebundling” phase as users seek fewer, better FinTech apps with greater functionality—a shift made possible by the rise of embedded finance and API-first infrastructure of the sort that Slate is building.

“For years, platforms have had the data and the customer relationships to offer financing, but the infrastructure in Canada just wasn’t there,” Elliot told BetaKit. “That’s now changing, and we’re seeing a real shift where platforms want to own more of the financial experience for their customers.”

Feature image courtesy Slate.