Why Dune Ventures Recommends Slash to Its Portfolio Companies

“Slash has been incredible to work with.”

Five years ago, David Brillembourg created Dune Ventures to help talented founders build large companies in unique, overlooked markets. Today, Dune's portfolio includes everything from pre-seed companies with a single employee to multi-billion dollar businesses with hundreds of people. With a group that diverse, David realized he needed to handle a wide range of financial needs and team sizes at the same time.

Not only was Slash the platform Dune chose to handle their banking needs, but it’s also the platform David has introduced many of his portfolio companies to.¹

How Dune’s Startups Take Advantage of Slash

The financial needs of a two-person pre-seed company often look nothing like those of a 150-person Series B. Most tools are built for one end of that spectrum or the other. Slash, however, has handled both. "Slash has been incredible at onboarding all of those different types of customers and giving them all equal support," David said. "They've been extremely fast with our startups."

With up to 3.80% annualized yield, Slash’s treasury accounts have made a big impact on the health of Dune’s portfolio companies.⁶ In David’s words, "Slash has an incredible treasury product that offers top-of-market yield, which extends our startups' runways, which is really important." Early-stage companies that earn yield on idle cash can use that extra capital to make big strides that may not have otherwise been possible.

The platform’s spend controls have also been valuable to Dune's startups, especially the ones on the smaller side. "Slash also has a lot of automations that help our startups who tend to not have large scale teams save time on finances and add controls to their team spending. So even when the team is 1-2 people, or 100, they can control different types of spend across the company." These tools are largely found within the Slash Visa® Platinum Card, which can be configured with merchant restrictions, spend ceilings, and custom permissions. Additionally, any suspicious transactions are automatically flagged for review.

For the more crypto-native companies in Dune's portfolio, Slash's stablecoin support has opened up payment options that traditional banking platforms don’t usually offer.⁴ "One of the reasons our startups love working with Slash is because Slash has native stablecoin support,” said David. “Having the ability to move capital not only through traditional payment rails, but also crypto-native payment rails, is super helpful."

The Skills to Pay the Bills

As a venture capital firm, Dune Ventures itself is a busy operation. Invoices come in constantly from vendors, service providers, and portfolio expenses. Before Slash, keeping up with it all was a time-consuming grind.

"We used to have to go through account payables every month, go through contracts, invoices, bill pays, and analyze everything. It would take us hours a week," David explained.

Slash's bill pay features solved this problem overnight. "Now with Slash and their AI features, it parses through everything before I even see the bill, tells me exactly how much I owe, how much I have to pay, and by what time,” said David. “It automates the entire process for me, saving me hours."

The team at Dune can sit back as Slash parses an invoice, routes it through approvals, creates a draft bill, and sets it up for payment through nearly any rail. Thanks to integrations with accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct, that invoice data is automatically reconciled to their books without any manual transcription.

Continuing to Grow

As Dune Ventures expands its portfolio of forward-thinking founders, it continues to rely on Slash for automated bill pay features, high-yield treasury, advanced spend controls, and more. For David Brillembourg, that’s a set of tools that’s tough to picture life without.

"Slash lets me run my business, it lets my portfolio companies run their businesses, it lets our founders be founders, and it lets us not have to think about the minutia of finance."

David’s faith in his portfolio companies gets stronger when they onboard with Slash. He can rest assured knowing they’re earning yield on idle cash, cash back on card spend, and extra time on automated bill pay functions. As long as David keeps adding startups to Dune’s roster, he’ll keep recommending Slash to their finance teams.