A supplier that wins a large order from a major US retailer often has to spend heavily on production before it sees any revenue from that order. The financing for that stage has traditionally been slow, expensive or unavailable.
Bridge, a lending platform founded in 2023 by Rohit Mathur and Harte Thompson after its spin-out from Citi, is trying to close that gap. In August it announced a partnership with LuminArx Capital Management, a global alternative investment manager, to provide USD 500 million in financing for consumer brands and suppliers filling orders for retailers including Walmart, Sam’s Club and Best Buy. Bridge says it has deployed more than USD 800 million to date.
Mathur, Bridge’s co-founder and CEO, said the need is long-standing and the difficulty is structural. “Production financing is inherently difficult because the lender is not just underwriting whether a customer like Walmart will pay,” he said. “It is underwriting whether the supplier can actually produce and deliver the product, on time and on spec, while preserving enough margin.”
That work used to be manual and bespoke, which kept institutional money out. “As a result, the market has largely been served by smaller specialty lenders charging high rates to compensate for the time and resources that come with increased complexity,” Mathur said.
Lending ahead of the balance sheet
The core problem with conventional underwriting, in his view, is that it looks backwards. “The opportunity may be very real for the brand, but it does not yet show up in historical revenue, receivables or inventory,” he said. “In fact, the supplier needs the financing precisely because it has to spend the money to create those assets in the first place. A traditional lender is therefore being asked to lend ahead of what the historical financials alone can justify.”
Bridge instead assesses the specific order alongside the supplier’s record with the retailer, its margins, manufacturing partners and production cycle. “That allows us to underwrite the company’s ability to execute on the opportunity in front of it, rather than asking whether yesterday’s balance sheet is large enough to support tomorrow’s order,” he said.
AI, he said, changes both what can be underwritten and how closely it is watched. It lets Bridge weigh signals “such as whether a supplier has repeatedly delivered similar products to the same retailer on time”, and it supports continuous monitoring. “We can continue evaluating the supplier and each draw throughout the life of the facility, giving us a much more current view of the credit as the underlying risk changes, allowing us to get more comfortable with more suppliers.”
How the USD 500 million will be used
The LuminArx programme is aimed at brands selling to large retailers, from long-standing Walmart suppliers to those breaking in for the first time. “Facilities go up to USD 10 million and can even go higher for larger businesses, with funding tied to commitments from retailers and the costs required to produce and deliver them,” Mathur said. “We don’t necessarily even need a confirmed purchase order.”
“Our goal is to make a credit decision in less than two weeks and, once approved and documentation is complete, fund production within days,” he added.
For the retailer, he argued, the benefit of embedding finance in its supplier ecosystem is practical. “They want products produced, delivered on time and available on shelves. If a good supplier is capital constrained, that becomes a supply chain problem for the retailer too,” he said. Using verified order and performance data, “the retailer can help strengthen supplier liquidity without becoming the lender itself”.
Managing credit risk
Supply chain finance has a history of high-profile failures, and Mathur tied several of them to lenders relying on information they could not check. “The first principle is to verify as much as possible at the source,” he said. “We verify upcoming orders, supplier performance data, and control the flow of cash from funding the manufacturer through repayment from the retail buyer. We also monitor the supplier and each draw throughout the production cycle so we can identify deterioration early, rather than waiting for a payment problem to emerge.”
At portfolio level, he said Bridge is “deliberately building a diversified book of small and mid-sized suppliers rather than concentrating too much capital in any one borrower”.
Beyond retail suppliers, Bridge also lends in hospitality, working with large corporates to finance the franchisees in their networks. “Both markets are large and still underserved,” Mathur said. “Our goal is to continue building Bridge into a one-stop financing platform for these customers, partnering with capital providers like LuminArx and using technology to make the flow of capital faster, simpler, and more efficient.”
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