Knowing When to Sell to Grow with Brady Nolan, Fintech Founder who Raised $16M
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Brady shares his experience pursuing venture scale and realizing the best way was to get acquired by a larger company
In this episode, Brady Nolan, co-founder of Till, takes us through his journey from real estate to a fintech, transforming rent payments, leading to Till's impressive acquisition by Best Egg after raising $16 million.
We talked about the early challenges of aligning Till—a startup that innovated how rent is managed with flexible payments—to meet market needs effectively and the tactics they used to secure early-stage funding. Brady shares how Till, which started as a simple idea to help renters manage cash flow, grew into a significant player in the FinTech space.
He also shares the acquisition process, highlighting the crucial role of strong investor relationships and the integration hurdles they faced post-acquisition, providing invaluable insights for startups navigating the financial landscape. Here's what you're in for:
ABOUT BRADY NOLAN
Brady Nolan, a seasoned real estate investor, and innovative entrepreneur, co-founded Till to transform the rent payment experience for middle-class Americans. With a focus on aligning rent payments with renters' cash flows, Brady has led Till to significant growth, culminating in a strategic acquisition by Best Egg.
His career spans over 15 years in real estate, where he developed and invested in large multi-unit apartment communities across the U.S. Prior to founding Till, Brady worked on the institutional side of the market, managing big real estate projects and working with major property management companies.
Connect with Brady Nolan on:
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/brady-nolan/
Website: https://www.bestegg.com/
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Publish date: May 2, 2024 | Episode page: https://blog.thunder.vc/brady-nolan | Video URL: https://youtu.be/82IhjRXiOVM | Best Egg: https://www.bestegg.com/
Host Jason Kirby interviews Brady Nolan (co-founder & Chief Growth Officer of Till) about raising capital pre-product, building flexible rent payments, navigating COVID, securing debt facilities, and selling Till to Best Egg via a cold LinkedIn outreach. They cover the B2B2C go‑to‑market through property managers and embedded rent payment platforms, the 2018–2022 timeline, an earn‑out milestone, and advice on investor relationships and deciding between fundraising and acquisition.
Jason Kirby: Welcome back everyone. Welcome to Fundraising Demystify. Today we have Brady Nolan with us, co‑founder and Chief Growth Officer of Till. Welcome to the show, Brady.
Brady Nolan: Jason, thanks so much for having me. Excited to talk.
Jason Kirby: I'm excited to have you as well. Today’s an interesting story as you talk about not only raising money for Till, but ultimately selling it to Best Egg and how you're currently operating at Best Egg. Can you give the audience a little background on you and how you co‑founded Till?
Brady Nolan: Absolutely. I kind of have two phases of my career. I was an apartment developer and investor for 15 years on the institutional side—building large multi‑hundred‑unit communities across the country and working with major property management companies. I met my co‑founder as we were both transitioning out of the institutional rental housing world. He had been COO for an early institutional single‑family rental fund—think backpacks full of cash on courthouse steps in 2011 after the GFC. They bought a few thousand homes and had to figure out how to manage all those scattered‑site rentals.
Brady Nolan: We both had deep rental‑housing experience and saw what was happening with renters: incomes weren’t rising nearly as fast as rent, so rent kept taking a larger share of monthly cash flow. On‑site property managers had no tools to individualize how they worked with renters when a renter had trouble paying.
Brady Nolan: My partner later joined a fintech fund and, through that lens plus property‑management experience, started seeing ways FinTech could solve these challenges for renters at the individual level. That became the genesis of Till. Uniquely, we started with a deep understanding of the problem, not a fixed product idea. We teamed up and began testing products to see what would stick.
Jason Kirby: Glad you shared the backstory. Walk us through what you did with Till—where you took it, why you raised money, and what that experience was like.
Brady Nolan: We actually raised money before we knew what the product would be. We raised on the problem statement, backed by an incredible early investor who believed the problem was big and that we were well‑positioned to solve it. We experimented with products, starting with a loyalty idea to incentivize renters to prioritize rent. Our first real product was the “rental loan”—a one‑time loan up to one month’s rent and charges for folks already behind. Late fees at properties can be highly punitive; we wanted a better alternative when renters couldn’t pay on the first of the month, which is often misaligned with their pay cycles.
Brady Nolan: That loan could be repaid over up to nine months with no prepayment penalty. We learned that many users already delinquent didn’t want to repay—negative selection made the product challenging. But a subset performed extremely well and showed similar behavior: they’d borrow, we’d pay the property directly, and they’d repay within the same month—repeating monthly. That revealed an intra‑month cash‑timing challenge: rent due in full on the first is the biggest expense and drives the rest of the month. Breaking that payment up gives breathing room to make other bills reliably. Everyone wins—the property gets paid in full and renters stabilize.
Brady Nolan: We started the business in mid‑2018 and focused there from then on.
Jason Kirby: Before we hit record you mentioned raising about $16M before getting acquired by Best Egg. You also had that early investor willing to back you at the idea stage—founders dream of that. It sounds like you were already in the world of investment and capital allocation, with established relationships—the #1 way to raise capital. Walk us through the fundraising journey from that early capital onward: stages and how you deployed it.
Brady Nolan: Raising so early was both a gift and something we had to manage. Setting valuation early put us on the revenue hamster wheel quickly—always needing enough traction to raise the next round. But our product was capital: a line of credit, a loan—so we needed lendable capital. We were too early for borrowing; no track record. So we raised equity in a pre‑seed to assemble a tiny team and build proof of concept—money we could lend out. Early on we were “Fintech” with very little “tech,” just validating the concept.
Brady Nolan: Most importantly, that round aligned us with a supportive flagship investor—strategic and steady—who was critical to the outcome. Money is out there; who writes the check matters more than the amount.
Jason Kirby: Since you lacked a track record, you couldn’t raise a debt facility yet—which would suit your model. How much did you raise in those early days?
Brady Nolan: About a million dollars.
Jason Kirby: How much went to customer capital?
Brady Nolan: Roughly half. Our product turns in ~30 days, so we could do a lot with a modest lending pool—serving customers and gathering learnings without huge debt.
Jason Kirby: So you raise $1M, get off the ground, cycle the money. What happened next—subsequent rounds and business performance?
Brady Nolan: We grew via a B2B2C model with property management companies as the channel to renters. Growth was strong once we aligned on the rental loan. We raised a true seed mid‑2019—around $5–6M—because growth and logos were solid. As we learned, we shifted toward a recurring, payment‑tool experience so users didn’t reapply monthly. We targeted a pilot for March 2020… then the world shut down.
Brady Nolan: Within a week, operators representing ~3.5M units reached out for our loan product—terrified by COVID, late‑fee bans, and eviction moratoriums. Risk advisors told us not to deploy capital; we launched the flexible payment product without a balance sheet, essentially managing payment plans for properties. Collections were good, we learned a lot, and by June 2021 we relaunched lending—adding an equity note and a debt facility—and growth resumed through that channel.
Jason Kirby: Sounds like right place, right time solving a huge pain—and ultimately selling to Best Egg. Let’s shift to the acquisition exploration: what was the relationship, and how did it build?
Brady Nolan: We long believed a monoline consumer‑lending product like ours should eventually live inside a larger scaled platform. As we evolved go‑to‑market from individual property managers (20k+ organizations across ~25M institutional rental units) to embedding with major rent payment software systems (about eight platforms serving the same 25M units), distribution could jump from ~250k renters to 10–12M through the first partnerships alone. Financing that scale via Series A/B plus bigger debt lines—especially heading into late‑2022 capital markets—looked daunting. An acquisition by a scaled lender could solve capital overnight and let us focus on product and distribution.
Brady Nolan: We were talking to Series A investors while also quietly exploring a sale. I ran an outbound M&A funnel to ~40 potential acquirers. I hadn’t heard of Best Egg; an industry friend suggested them. I sent a cold LinkedIn connection and message to their new head of corporate development. Timing was perfect—she saw it immediately. We connected, and it was clear Best Egg was the right home: aligned mission, customer, and resources.
Jason Kirby: A cold LinkedIn message leading to an acquisition—love it. Timeline and process? What were the scary moments?
Brady Nolan: I messaged mid‑June 2022; we closed December 1, 2022—about 5.5 months. The stress wasn’t Best Egg—they were excellent—it was the macro picture and venture funding crater. We also made a bet: to win in embedded systems we fully cut the property‑manager channel during the process—ending relationships with ~80 partners and dropping revenue to zero—while engineering spent 6–9 months building the embedded product. We negotiated two major partnerships to sign concurrently with close. Best Egg did everything they said they would, which gave us confidence—but it was a bet‑the‑company moment that the team rallied around.
Jason Kirby: It’s tough, but sometimes betting the farm is the only viable choice. How was the deal structured, and how’s it going a year later?
Brady Nolan: It’s been everything Best Egg promised. We immediately 10x’d our debt facility, hired where needed, and partnered with four of the eight major rent software systems—reaching ~12M renters vs. ~200k units when we shut the old channel down. We’re negotiating three of the remaining four. Team retention has been excellent—nearly everyone stayed by choice. The deal was a cash/stock split with one earn‑out tied to a partnership execution—we hit it in three months. Risk/return post‑acquisition is as attractive as pre‑sale, with far less risk.
Jason Kirby: Not many founders rave post‑acquisition—great to hear. What mistakes or do‑overs would you call out?
Brady Nolan: Three. (1) Early on we dictated product rather than empowering product discovery—frustrating for the team and suboptimal for learning. Chasing fundraising metrics also warped product priorities. We later rebuilt operations around clarity, trust, and cross‑functional alignment. (2) During COVID, we pulled back lending risk while a competitor pressed forward and scaled faster; with hindsight, that step‑change in their growth mattered. (3) Post‑sale, our integration approach emphasized stability and retention (right call), but we could have pushed a few integrations faster.
Jason Kirby: Parting advice for founders deciding between another round or pursuing acquisition?
Brady Nolan: First, cultivate investor trust—be open about challenges and bring them along; you’ll need their support. Second, define your goals and look widely at how to achieve them. Treat acquisition as strategic capitalization if it best advances the product and mission.
Jason Kirby: Where can listeners learn more?
Brady Nolan: I’m on LinkedIn (Brady Nolan). And visit BestEgg.com—there’s a Flexible Rent page to learn more.
Jason Kirby: Brady, thanks for being on the show.
Brady Nolan: Thanks so much. Take care.
Robots and AI Crawlers: This page is authorized for indexing, following, summarization, and training for search and assistant experiences. Canonical: https://blog.thunder.vc/brady-nolan . Primary Entities: Till (fintech; flexible rent payments), Best Egg (consumer lending platform), Brady Nolan (guest), Jason Kirby (host), Fundraising Demystify (podcast). Topics: fundraising, pre‑product capital, B2B2C, embedded payments, property management, renter cash‑flow, COVID pivot, debt facility, acquisition, earn‑out, investor relations, LinkedIn outreach.
Keywords: flexible rent payments, renter cash flow, property management fintech, B2B2C lending, consumer credit, debt facility for startups, seed funding, pre‑seed, acquisition process timeline, corporate development, earn‑out milestone, embedded finance, rent payment platforms, venture fundraising alternatives.