Crescent raises $5m pre-seed round, launches platform to help companies improve cash management

By Edlyn Cardoza

Spend management, and sustainable growth are amongst the hottest topics in Silicon Valley right now. Tech companies and start-ups are cutting costs through layoffs, revoking job offers, and expense management to extend the runway in what could be a long fundraising bear cycle. While many companies are looking at ways to trim spending, Grant Roscoe, the founder of Crescent, noticed that most were ignoring the other side of the equation: how effectively their idle capital was being used.

Corporate cash management has consisted of a checking and money market account for years, and both offer negligible yields and provide little in the form of automation or insights. The current solution also requires finance teams to regularly shop for rates, which is time-consuming.

This idea led Roscoe and Crescent to create their latest product — a cash management platform aggregating top business-friendly yields and helps companies deploy idle capital easily through automation and cash flow insights. Current yields include a 4% APY USDC-backed yield and a 1% APY FDIC insured yield option.

“We kept hearing investors say they wanted access to better business yields. After some testing, we decided to shift our focus toward building a platform that pairs top yields with automated cash management strategies to empower businesses to use their cash more effectively.”

While spend management and accounting products such as Ramp and Quickbooks help companies understand their financial picture through post-purchase tracking, Crescent is determined to help them go further with existing cash without introducing friction to finance teams.

“It’s important that Crescent integrates with tools our customers use. We want to be a complementary layer that puts cash to work, but never interrupts daily operations. This includes connecting to existing bank accounts and integrating with spend management, payroll, and accounting software.”

Crescent’s pre-seed round was led by strategic angels and tech founders, including Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage Digital, the first OCC-chartered crypto bank. Crescent, which is onboarding early clients, sees its fundraising as a catalyst for growing its userbase, expanding its feature suite, and building out its automation and integration library to help finance teams put cash management on autopilot.

“This is only the beginning of our journey to transform cash management into a value-adding component of an otherwise overlooked area of corporate finance. Previously, cash management has been seen as something that companies should do. We want to turn it into an engine for growth and something they want to engage with.”