Startup Series: Banyan Infrastructure
Today's guest is Amanda Li, Co-Founder & COO at Banyan Infrastructure.
Banyan Infrastructure is unleashing capital to accelerate the development of next-generation infrastructure projects to provide essential services across the globe and transform the world's energy systems into sustainable forms of energy. The startup combines financial and technological innovation to accelerate the deployment of solar, wind, and other critical infrastructure around the globe. They use blockchain-based, innovative contract technology to oversee and automate complex and time-consuming contractual management of these small distributed assets. Their solution de-risks these assets for lenders, decreases overhead costs, and increases the ability to refinance these projects at a lower cost of capital. Before co-founding Banyan Infrastructure, Amanda was an Infrastructure Investor at Generate Capital and Management Consultant at McKinsey & Company. She has also served many product roles at technology and renewables startups across Canada, China, and the US.
In this episode, Amanda takes me through the company's mission, the product, and what led her to co-found the company. Then, we dive into how these projects are traditionally financed, the problem Banyan is tackling, and other areas of project finance ripe for innovation. Amanda and I have a great discussion, and it was exciting to learn more about what Banyan is doing.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded July 29, 2021
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Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason, here I am. The my climate journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the, my climate journey or MCJ as we call it. Membership option membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show. That weren't just looking for education, but there were longing for a peer group as well.
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At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website and click. the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy. the show. Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs. And welcome to my climate journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Today's guest is Amanda Li, chief operations officer and co-founder of Banyan Infrastructure. Banyan is unleashing capital to accelerate the development of the next generation of infrastructure projects that will provide essential services like electricity, to all people across the globe and transform the world energy systems to sustainable forms of energy. In the process, their technology helped lenders originate service and syndicate loans to infrastructure projects at higher volume and lower costs.
I was excited for this one because project finance is such an essential piece. Of the equation. And as these projects get smaller and more distributed, it requires different systems and processes to make financing these projects viable. We cover a lot in this episode, including project finance. 101, how it works. Who's getting funding today. Who's doing the funding, the criteria for funding and some of the gaps that make scaling that funding downstream to these smaller more distributed projects, difficult. We also then have a great discussion about Banyan's role, their solution, the origin story of the company, their progress to date and where they're going next. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda Li: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Psyched to have you. Yeah. I've been a fan of Banyan infrastructure for quite a while. So really excited to have the opportunity to dig in deeper personally, to learn and to introduce it to anyone that's listening that might not be familiar with it already.
Amanda Li: That sounds fantastic. Let's fire away.
Jason Jacobs: Okay. Well, Taking it from the top what's Banyan infrastructure
Amanda Li: So Banyan infrastructure, we built software for banks and investors to sustainable infrastructure, like renewable energy to allow them to better originate service and securitize, these types of investments, basically allowing for there to be more capital to be brought into the space by project financiers.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And what's the origin story of the company, How did it come to be? When did it come to be? Why did it come to be.
Amanda Li: Yes. So I guess well, the story, if I want to add in the, my climate journey, part of that, I think Do we want to go there. Or do we just want to hear about the company origin?
Jason Jacobs: Both. Yeah, if you didn't, I was going to ask you about your personal journey after, so whichever way you want to tackle it, is great.
Amanda Li: That sounds fantastic. I think I'll rope in my own background with that. That's actually how it, typically the pitch goes to investors, but with my own journey it involves being very deeply passionate about climate. It actually comes from the conservation angle of all things. And as a kid, I had my businessman, my father say, you can make a lot more impact by building things and, you know, finding new technologies, deploying it, changing systems. And so got myself a degree in engineering. And I was like, Hey, let's go change systems. And that's, what's going to help make this planet a more sustainable place. Turns out I didn't have the personal appetite to stay in engineering as much for twofold. One. I didn't think I had the patience or genius to get a PhD and really advanced technology.
But secondly, I really fell into the camp of deployment it's such a big issue that we need to tackle as well. Even when I was getting my degree, we could. have solved the law problems with existing technologies. If we had systems in place like operational efficiencies policies in place and capital markets, and so fast forward, I very luckily managed to be an early employee, I think, the first employee at Generate capital and got to be there firsthand seeing how to deploy capital into this space in an innovative manner to really solve that capital gap, right, how to get deployment at scale. By in many ways, business model innovation, right? Allowing for there to be. Standardized high volume, affordable capital to project financier's, which in many ways is a very similar mission to Banyan. But while I was at generate and talking to other project financiers, saw that there was a lot of friction to project finance, which is to say that. You know, project finance in itself, even just regular project finance from 10, 20, 40 years ago, building like a nuclear power plant or a coal plant is complex, right? You don't have like a FICO score equivalent that you can just, you know, understand once and then immediately give money out. Right? You have to understand technology risk.
You have to understand the financials, the counterparties, then you build these large contracts With complex workflows, complex covenants attract upfront for underwriting. And now for the rest of the life of the asset or the life of the financial product that you are engaged with, right? You're either an owner.
You need to know this for the next 40 years, or you're a lender and you need to know for the next 5, 10 20, however, the loan is. So that was complex to do in old scale project finance. Now we have increasingly small systems and so it got more complex, right? Instead of a single billion dollar. Coal plant or hydro facility, you're trying to invest in a thousand million dollar solar facilities. That's a thousand times more contracts, more data, more counterparties to deal with. And it becomes really difficult managing your data, managing your workflows and trying to keep it standard. And as I was looking at this, it seemed like that's a technology problem, right. That you can tackle that other FinTech companies have done for SMB lending, Or mortgages or credit cards, why don't we have similar tools in project finance. And so we tinkered around that idea and said, Hey, why don't we build this FinTech product for project finance so that we can start to have this product that brings in all of this complex data, contextualizes it meaningfully, and then allows project financiers to do their jobs much more quickly, much more affordably, do small projects and not be boggled down, copying and pasting things from Excel, from PDFs All of that.
Jason Jacobs: And what is it, you think that's making the smaller projects start to proliferate? Is why do the big projects come first for example.
Amanda Li: The big projects have been more traditionally how infrastructure, you know, where infrastructure dollars went because that's what infrastructure looks like, Right? The types of power plants we had were big centralized facilities. And the other types of infrastructure lenders also did things like bridges or roads. Well, now we finally have this distributed infrastructure concept, right? Not only with renewable energy. right? This is solar panels on and on farms or on warehouse rooftops.
Some are on residential rooftops, small localized, but even other types of sustainable infrastructure, such as water systems or ag systems are more localized In the two-fold manner. Right? One, a lot of the technologies lend themselves to be possible now, right. To build in a local manner. But two, it's also a different way of engaging and having direct ownership to the end consumer. Right? They can have resiliency for whichever commodity they need on house. And there are business models and financiers, like Generate capital that can provide that financing and allow for that to be possible. It also is a benefit, right. Provides a lot of resiliency. against The downfalls of a climate change as then, you can have your own little mini power grid or water systems and all of that. But yes, the other big downside of having all of this right is it's complex. It's many more investments for a bank or a financier to make, rather than just one big one.
Jason Jacobs: And historically, how have the billion dollar projects gotten financed?
Amanda Li: Yeah, you have these very entrenched players that were traditionally financing. This oftentimes sometimes even with the government or the government financing in certain countries and areas where you have people with deep industry knowledge that can understand the complexities of both the technology, the contractual risk make very fancy, structured contracts and put out very large check sizes, Right? If you have a billion dollar project, You put a few percentage points onto overhead into managing this. And that's a lot of people that you can hire to make sure that this goes well, that the data is collected as needed all of that. Right. And so it's these same players that are starting to come in and, and do the new type of infrastructure investing. But again, it's, it's difficult. Right. You know, the systems they have are meant for investing in these large projects, we've talked to a good number of banks and larger funds, right. Where they say our minimum check size is a hundred million dollars before we'll be interested. Right. That's a small project, Right. But you're, you're not going to see some sort of CNI solar project on a warehouse roof. That's a hundred million dollars. That's going to rely on this new breed of investor to come in, That is more localized that it can still figure out, understand the same complexities and underwrite the risk needed for these smaller projects.
Jason Jacobs: And for the big projects who are typically the the customers that are securing this financing, is it the developers or what entities or what types of entities
Amanda Li: Yeah. you have, the more traditional developers of the traditional technologies out there, right? Those that build large scale plants and the utilities that sometimes make them directly themselves and large scale banks, large scale financiers. a billion dollars is a lot of money, right?
So you have people who have a lot of capital and a lot of People power on their teams to be able to build and process and build through this multi-year cycle of getting something out there versus what we see with a smaller distributed assets. Right? You can have localized team, right? The two guys in a truck type of analogy out there and so, It looks very different.
Jason Jacobs: And in terms of what actually needs to happen to dot the I's and cross the T's and structure and execute these financings. Is it the same things that need to happen? And you just don't have the same resources as you go smaller, or are there other differences that are more fundamental?
Amanda Li: [inaudible 00:11:35] is very parallel, obviously, as you go smaller, right? You're not going to do as deep in many places. And there are certain steps that maybe you would skip out on between like a billion dollar financing and a million dollar one. That's probably a very large range, but that looks very similar in the buckets, right. There's operating risks, right? financial risks, legal risks, all those buckets of risks still need certain amount of things checked as you go smaller. There are less things that maybe you need to look at. Because there are less complexities, but because the buckets are still the same, you're not checking a thousand times less things, right.
You're maybe checking up like half or fewer of those, but the process looks very similar. And, you know, if you were to think about making a perfect process flow for a large scale system, if you could do it for the small scale system, that would be a very well run and very transparent and very well managed series of data for the small system. It would just be overkill in some ways.
Jason Jacobs: So as you're bringing, uh, a solution, like the one that Banyan is providing to market, is there a fork in the road where there's a choice of either enabling the traditional financier's to go smaller through licensing this to them as a lender, versus actually becoming a lender yourselves?
Amanda Li: Oh, that's a very interesting question. I think certainly you see other FinTech companies that use their own software and become a bank or become a financier of some sort, right. And you have a proprietary data and better system, so you can provide better insights. That's certainly maybe, a possibility that we could fireball off, but if we think about impact, which is very core to our own mission. We feel like we can make a much larger footprint by allowing our tools to be in as many hands as possible. Every single bank and fund out there will need to have a digital strategy and technical systems to enable them to. Be in this market and go smaller. It seems extremely inefficient for all of them to be building their own, Right. We've had some quotes, the internal systems costing, you know, five, $10 million dollars. and a million dollars plus a year to maintain. Right. You know, why not have a tool that, you know, you could buy off the shelf and is maintained for you across a number of other facilities. That's going to be the faster way that everyone will be more comfortable and have more data at their hands right off the bat.
To answer your question though, in a different manner. I think there's sort of this like third bucket, right? Which is there is bringing larger banks to water, which is to say, Hey, you are a financier. Who's only comfortable at a hundred million dollar check size. Let's give you more data so you can write $10 million dollar checks one day and then even more data so you can write one million dollar checks one day. That's certainly one area where we would love to help bring capital to market.
The other area though is really enabling Smaller financial institutions, both newcomers coming to market, right? These new funds are raising a hundred million dollars here and there sort of following the footsteps in some ways of generate, but also local lenders, local facilities, right? When we think about your local credit union or a community bank, and many ways, those financial institutions are. Better better equipped, right. To be making that check to their local communities. Right? Not all infrastructure is being built in New York city and London, even though that's where a lot of the dollars are coming from And so you have your local, you know, farmer or manufacturer who wants solar on their roof. They want to go to their local lender. Their local lender doesn't really have the tools or a large pile of capital or the insights and the big team, like the wall street banks might have what we'd love to be able to enable is to say you local lenders.
Now you can have these tools. You can now do more financing of this type of, for complex project finance. Maybe you want to do a solar plus storage deal, and you previously were uncomfortable with storage now without hiring this big team, that wall street has, you can enter this facility, service, your local customers, and as you bundle them, up, Maybe one day, get to that hundred million dollar number that the wall street bank wants as a minimum And you can then bundle that into a syndicated loan portfolio or a security out to wall street, and then create the liquidity that way. So that's sort of the third bucket, which is we can enable new lenders into this space where every single financial institution should be able to invest in sustainable project finance if they have the tools and the insights at their fingertips.
Jason Jacobs: So the world that I come from is more the early stage, Equity capital world of venture capital and very early stage companies where you can do modeling. But a lot of times, especially in the more formative stages, it's more art than science, right? It comes down to intuition. It comes down to team. And when you're in the project finance world from project to project, how much art is there? I mean, is it strictly science or said another way, how much modeling versus intuition goes into it?
Amanda Li: I'm sure there are certainly some people out there who will say there's some art. and that's the strategic advantage maybe that particular partner or fund has, but certainly as you get to larger institutions, right, it should approach more science. Right. And in many ways, a venture is earlier than in project finance. For that very reason that you take less of the art of it and turn it more into quantitative. analysis, Right. Ultimately, if you could create an equivalent of a FICO score for a single CNI project, energy storage project, that would be a gold standard, right.
That everyone's agreed upon risk Coming from quantitative areas translated into a single rating where we I'm not too sure if we'll ever get to there, but that certainly is what everyone is driving towards. Right. And you'll hear oftentimes in project finances podcasts about how we get towards standardization and bankability via making it more of a science, right. More predictable. We know exactly. that due to these X behaviors or these X attributes that there will be Y performance. And the more you can do that, the more comfortable everyone gets more investments will happen. The lower the cost of capital will be. And in many ways we think about that from a software perspective, right? The insights to that is basically saying, how can we just get data to be transparent and normalized, which is something that software is excellent at doing right. Taking information in and transforming it and trying to make it apples to apples across various types of technologies, various types of structures.
Jason Jacobs: So I'll ask this question twice, once for the. big Traditional projects and once for this more distributed projects that Banyan focuses on, but is it red light, green light? does the, I mean, does the algorithm just kind of spit out an answer of like, yes, it raises the bar or it meets clear the bar or no, it doesn't or is there a lot of gray and then a lot of room for discussion and debate about a specific decision?
Amanda Li: Yeah, it's definitely a lot of gray still. Right. And I think what we are moving towards is to get to as much red light green light an area as possible. I don't think it will actually ever be truly like, We're going to have some sort of AI system. It's going to adjust all your PDF documents and spit out. Like, yes, this project is a AAA and that's where we're at maybe far later in the development of technology.
But what's useful right now is that you want to get to almost what's called, in between, which is red light green light in specific areas, right. Where we can say, oh, this specific type of risk, right? This customer credit, or this technology warranty is a good one or a bad one, right. It's high or low risk.
And when we get into specific areas, we start to get multiple red, light, green lights. In fact, this is somewhat what the Banyan platform looks like, right. Where you can be like this series of risks are good and bad, right? We have Compliance in these areas, right? You've been compliant in your reserve accounts for a while. You've been compliant in your operating actions, which is forecast green, green, green, right. But you're red in this one area. And now you can bring in more of the gray, which is to say, someone can look at this, right. We still involve people and can say, make an assessment based on, okay. Based on all these greens in this one red, What does that mean? Right. Who do we need to talk to? What does that mean for our negotiations in this contract to make it better or worse terms for the developer or the borrower? There will still be a lot of human element. But that human element I think is very important. What's not important. in The human element is getting to that metric, right?
It's such a waste of time to take an associate who has a fancy MBA and really wants to work in climate change and say half of your week, or your entire week is going to be compiling numbers together from various spreadsheets, copying them together. So it can output a number so that you can make that decision that's more of the gray area, more of the art.
Jason Jacobs: And is Banyan strictly focused on the structuring and organizing, or are you also helping on the assessment side?
Amanda Li: We are mostly on the structuring organizing today. So it's still a startup. And I think when we went in and started this back in 2018 we had a lot more excitement around like all the possibilities of what you can do with big data, Right? You see this a lot for other FinTech companies. It's the reason why. You can get like instantaneous car loans or mortgages, right? Because you have the machine doing a lot What we found though, is that there's so much low-hanging fruit in project finance still, I'm not sure if anyone listening who's been in it, right.
Especially those who are are looking for it themselves as developers or people developing technologies. You know, you'll see a lot of friction just in managing basic workflow and passing back and forth, basic data to equal basic metrics. That was where we were at today, where we want to bring project finance to what we call, you know, internet or FinTech 1.0, right. We have the data in one place. The workflows are very easy to assess. We're going back and forth on a single source of truth on a tool online rather than through email or a phone call or God forbid fax, right? Like let's get past that. So we can start to be really streamlined. See the same information and not waste any time.
That's what we say, where we are at today, because we're sort of trying to move off pen and paper in some ways, once you have that, though, the possibilities are sort of endless, right? Then you can get to that more. How can we take this information now that everything is digital and attached to these assets? How can you look at the historicals and make more interesting assessments? How can you bundle projects together to make more interesting financial products? All these insights are possible once you collect this beautiful pool of data. But right now, I think for private markets, the gold that we're looking for and digging for is just getting that data and in one place and of high quality and constantly, being updated.
Jason Jacobs: so the red light, or green light, or gray today is happening outside of the Banyan system?
Amanda Li: The red light and the green light is more of the metrics that are being tracked already as part of an agreement. Right? So you might say in a contract, I promise that the debt service coverage ratio is going to be over 1.2 and that's going to affirm how much coverage I have on my debts and therefore how risky this loan is at any given point of time in the loan contract.
It's already defined how you calculate your debt service, coverage ratio. You have to submit that and do that calculation every month to your, or every quarter to your lender. And your lender will use that to make assessments across the single portfolio of loans. Right. You know, instead with Banyan, we can aggregate the information and show you right away, whether you are in compliance or not to already the things that you have promised to be in compliance, for.
Jason Jacobs: but it's your threshold on a custom basis, So like the threshold I could input on a deal by deal basis.
Amanda Li: Yes.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And I'm no project finance expert, but if I was, I would want to understand, I mean, you mentioned this kind of complicated mess, but you can justify the resourcing to sort through it. If the product is high enough and you have a big enough budget, what are the key buckets of that complexity and which ones is Banyan addressing today? And which ones might you aspire to address directionally as the company and product evolve?
Amanda Li: Yeah. I think when we first launched, we actually really went first with a thick When I said the one-liner about being up front, right? With equity origination servicing securitization. We started with a lot more of the complexity around servicing your portfolio, your risks, your loans. And so we started there where it's like, Hey, there's a lot of complexity. That's really unpleasant around just managing the data of your day to day this is my description of covenant management and things like that. So we started there. That was Banyan's first application of let's make sure that everything that you've promised in an ongoing loan or an ongoing equity agreement are in compliance at all times. Right. Let's aggregate information automatically from. the Project itself from the bank accounts itself and make it so they're not spending weeks and weeks on end looking backwards. at information from reports that come out only every quarter, right? Instead we can have live information and better be able to manage our portfolio in an easier manner.
This year, we've come out with the origination side of that three-step life cycle of the investments. which is we also will help now with workflows to get it right at the moment. Right? If you don't really want it so that you are doing all this work upfront, assessing a deal, assessing a financial product, and understanding the risk, and then you pass it over to the service, then you have to reassess it all over again every single time and reinput data.
So managing that workflow to be standard and to also have a very streamlined manner. of Putting that into servicing is our next application. That third bucket, which is our next step, which is around securitization or syndication, we've chosen a lot of them to roll off the tongue more. But now that you have this great pool of data, how can you really simplify the ability to pool them together and trade them?
It should be as easy as dragging and dropping together. You know, living data rooms that are accurate and have beautiful reports. Put them together and send them to another entity of another financial institution or look towards creating security and then get those loans or projects off your books or get some leverage.
And that would be very exciting as a next big product milestone. We will say that the data across all of those right is the same data. So it's really just about creating the workflow, at each stage to gather its, creating The API to gather live data from other places and then moving it around downstream. And then as we get more advanced, right, automating as much as we can of the various workflows of the various risk assessments.
Jason Jacobs: And what are the timelines here? When did you start working on it? And when did you launch the product and where are you today in terms of traction? so far?
Amanda Li: Yeah. It Came out in 2018, had our first beta sort of, commercial deployment in 2019, to test things out. And have been off to the races since and are really in a mode right now to grow as fast as we can. We, from a company perspective, I think raised a pre-seed and the seed raised six million dollars, to date and are actually looking to raise our series a. You know, later this year, which is quite a bit earlier, which speaks really great to the market.
You know, originally we were like, Hey, let's do this slow and steady growth in many ways to get a few more customers this year, you know, high quality customers with the same size team and raise a series a next year. And instead what we saw was a really heavy Inbound type of funnel, where we're still focused on sort of these key partners as our customers.
But instead we see that almost everyone we get introduced to from our network really is in need of a digital strategy in order to scale, right? Every single time you read in wall street journal or New York times, a new fund has come up and new facilities have been fundraised or a new specialty lender has come out of a large operating company. I mean that they need tools and these numbers are getting larger and larger where they're not raising hundred million dollar fund. it's almost like a billion dollar multi-billion dollar fund out there. So we're seeing a lot of demand and that's really pushing us to move a lot faster and not only produce these product rollouts that I was talking about earlier at breakneck speed but we really start growing the team and going to market even faster than expected, which is a optimistic piece of news. I feel like we see on the ground about the dollars that are starting to commit into this. space.
Jason Jacobs: And what's the pricing model and I'm not necessarily looking for numbers, but more just kind of structurally, is it, I mean, is it SaaS or something else?
Amanda Li: Yeah, it's SaaS at the moment, It's very straightforward, not trying to reinvent the wheel. Right. We create tools. It's in many ways for the portfolio management team of these entities in the longer run. If we help with trading, we hope to be able to also take a, you know, if you can bundle up and trade, and do that in a more automated manner, not to spend all these fees on or less fees on lawyers and bankers and accountants to compile information and go to market. We'd love to take a few bits off the top there. Now, it would be a transaction-based fee and also very exciting as we make this very liquid market
Jason Jacobs: and these smaller distributed projects for customers that are serving this market and not using Banyan's software. How are they doing it typically? Are you displacing something else or is it DIY or are they just not serving this market?
Amanda Li: Oh, twofold. So for the people who are in the market, Excel, almost like, you know, 99 out of a hundred times, it's Excel, even larger institutions that have some degree of software in-house, have a very heavy Excel component. Excel is great for many things. I think if you're doing more advanced scenario analysis or building a custom structured model, I loved Excel, right?
I don't want to pry Excel of anyone's hands who love its ability to do complex. And unstandard modeling. Excel is awful for when you're trying to do portfolio management, right? You get like these 10 projects or these 100 projects. that need to bundle up into one. And then you, I mean, as you structure things on now, you have like six SPDs deep And each one will have their own Excel model that bundle up into larger ones that bundle up the more and you deleted one. And now it's all broken. This is not what it was built for. Right. And so that's where we really try to displace the things that people are pulling their hair out because it's quite broken the things where we hear stories about billion dollar funds that rely on macros built by an associate, that help compile the things together to generate their quarterly reports. I mean, that associates go, maybe go to business school and who is going to run this macro it's going to break, right? Like this is not a responsible way to manage your, your risk in your portfolio. It's also not scalable way. I think the other thing that we're seeing, which is to say. second answer to your question, which is where there are larger funds that are running on Excel.
The other, again, the marketplace is these smaller banks, smaller fund that aren't doing as much investment in the space because it's seen as difficult. It's a subject matter experts, deep area that you hire a lot for. So they're just not putting many dollars into this space. And that makes us very concerned, right? For the, the gap that we see. Which is quite large, right? We need to put out multiple trillions of dollars. If we take the OACD number, it's six trillion dollars a year. I think of infrastructure across all types, not just renewable energy And the entire world. And you know, we're less than one trillion dollars, right now, right? So that's a very alarming gap.
And so we need new entrants to come to this space. And for them not to feel like they need to hire an expert to build a custom Excel in order to, to play in the space and then to build up the world's largest back office. team.
Jason Jacobs: What does the team look like today in terms of size and also what types of skill sets you've got around the table?
Amanda Li: Yeah, it's basically, it's it's either from a project finance background or a technology background, right. It's still very engineering heavy, but we're looking to change that, As soon as possible. We're at 13 right now. We hope to be 15 in the next quarter or so. And again, the reason for doing the fundraise is to hopefully double the team size and really do more hiring around business development and customer success and get even more in-house expertise, across business development product on the project finance side. We'd love to be able to say we're built by project. financiers for our project financiers.
It is A a bit of, a, again, a niche space. And in order to extract that nicheness and normalize it, we need a lot of people in-house, who can speak the language, both to make the product built well, but also to speak the language to our customers.
Jason Jacobs: And is there a sales force in place today or who's who's out generating new business.
Amanda Li: We are heavily looking to build up the sales team. So I, as the CPO, do lead, most of the sales. my co-founder will helps out as well. He's the CEO, but we're at the juxtaposition where we're trying to transition from founder led sales or that seed stage area to. Hopefully right past the series a, which is a big sales team that has that insight that I was talking about. And so we're very excited to get to that point. We're certainly, I think I'm in a very large pipeline of our top of funnel that we could transact on a lot faster. I think if we had more. bodies.
Jason Jacobs: And you mentioned that there's a lot of white space still in project finance, other than the piece of it, that Banyan has bitten off. What are some others that stand out to you as things that you think are opportunities and that you hope someone would solve since it would help the whole space catalyze faster?
Amanda Li: Oh, yes, for sure. I think the entire vertical we've heard it from a few VCs, but the intersection of climate tech and FinTech is an awesome place to be. And and I don't think it's like, there's one company for all of that. Right. We are one of, hopefully many verticals within climate and FinTech. You know, the one that gets a lot of airtime is ESGs, and we certainly feel good about that because we can bring in that data, but there's certainly other places to also either Streamline more data for us or use our data to make more products. I think on both ends, we rely on that to be able to bring good data to our and good risk management to our customers. So on the bringing data inside of things, right? All these tools that allow us to grab things like bank data, right. We use Plaid to be, have access to thousands of banks at once If plaid hadn't existed, right. That would be an infinite number of bank, API integrations to do. And so that is a beautiful thing, but full blends of grabbing in utility data of grabbing in O&M data from a series of solar panels or wind farms, right. That having normalized information coming in makes it a lot easier for us to work with.
So all the people working on. More upstream data management for perhaps the developer or the O&M manager, or even, you know, other areas of just those, those beautiful APIs for utilities are great for us because we can have a more standardized data source to bring to the lender and to the project financier downstream.
Once we have all this data, we'd be very excited to have other FinTech tools use that data to be able to make new financial products. We're certainly interested in doing ourselves as well, but companies like energetic insurance who make insurance products to offset CNI customer risk, right. They need good data to be able to run their insurance product.
We would love people to provide there and collectively right. If you have Good workflow transparency and good risk management. And you have options of all these like hedges and financial products and insurance. You're just going to do a lot more deals and the pie grows and it's good for everyone.
Jason Jacobs: And if you could wave your magic wand and change one thing outside of the scope of your control or the company's control that would most accelerate your progress with what you're building, what would you change and how would you change it?
Amanda Li: Oh, I've heard you ask this question on multiple other ones and I should have been prepped for this. Maybe I'll give two answers as I think about a better one. The first one to mind, I think is a bit of a cop-out, which is obviously if there are strong regulatory or a strong political tailwind, it's very helpful to the market overall.
Uh, it's been top of mind for us, right? If there's a lot of incentive to come into this space. It's just another area where people will then come into infrastructure faster. And if there are things like, you know, I know the infrastructure bill, I think gaining some momentum with things like that, right Means that money is going to flow in and people will feel that there is more opportunity and we'll have more customers in many ways and feel that. Area, I think the other place, maybe that's more nuanced than just, saying regulatory tailwinds are helpful would be, I think perhaps an epiphany around... And I guess you asked for anything.
So I'll ask for an epiphany An epiphany from uh, large financial institutions that when we think around ESGs and building more sustainable portfolios, that like one of the places that you can have this double bomb impact line, when is an sustainable infrastructure. Right? And so what we see a lot of, when you hear about these big banks becoming more green is like, oh, we're going to move around our Existing funds so that it's like ESP compliant and like you know, This is any forward movement is great. So I don't want to like poo poo that, but it's sometimes a bit noisy, right? Like grants are saying they're green just by offering the same investments. They have reorganized, which isn't actually flowing more dollars into the space, Right. Like we'd love for that mental model of what green means. means that they're literally putting dollars towards building things into the ground, instead of like, let's do larger billion or trillion dollar ESG, new types of ESG funds. Right. Put that directly into infrastructure. Right. And you're going to make money, like, why not do that? And so like, if we could just have that, that shift a little bit faster, I think that would be a great amount of money to come into this space.
Jason Jacobs: And Amanda, for anyone listening, that's inspired by what you're doing. Who do you want to hear from and where might you need? help?
Amanda Li: Oh, yes. So obviously, if anyone is running a fund or running a bank, even if it's an associates, somewhere, a junior If you are personally day in, day out spending too much time in Excel and PDF. And you're like, this is an awful use of my time. I want to be assessing data, not crunching it. Then certainly reach out. We'd love to help you with that and make your life better. I think that's all is what we're looking for. But more specifically also we're looking to hire. If any of this was really interesting, we are probably hiring on all fronts soon and we'd love to add key mission-driven people to our space. And I guess that last bit is always fundraising. So that part is specifically also up for inputs We are probably going to do a series a in Q4 of 2021, not too sure when this will air.
Jason Jacobs: And is there anything I didn't ask that I should have, or any parting words for our listeners?
Amanda Li: Yeah, I think just to say that timing is great, but the gap is still very large. So I think it's a fantastic time to either be a climate entrepreneur or to put more funding into the space. And so we're really optimistic around the space growing, but there's still a very large gap. You know, it feels like sometimes with our lack of people, there is an infinite number of funds and dollars flowing in, but it's still not enough. And so if you can help more dollars flow in by either creating a fund and fundraising for it, or creating more tools in the climate FinTech space or using Banyan to jet us in your own funds. I think it does feel very urgent as optimistic as we are. It's I'm optimistic because the urgency is there. So I'm excited that this podcast exists to keep the pressure on. I encourage it. We certainly can't slow down.
Jason Jacobs: Great. Well, awesome discussion. Congrats on all the progress that you've made and best of luck to you and the whole Banyan infrastructure. team.
Amanda Li: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on my climate journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. No, That is .co, not com someday. We'll get the .com, but right now .co. you can also find me on Twitter at Jay Jacobs 22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests. You'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes.
The lawyers made me say that, thank you.
