Congratulations to the TRE Team!

The Receivables Exchange announced this morning that it has received $17 million in additional funding from a group led by Bain Capital Ventures to continue to scale its operations and to substantially expand its reach into the B2B receivables financing space.

Funding of this magnitude from sources as respected as Bain, Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks is a major vote of confidence in the future of this platform and this marketplace.

TRE, its founders and its entire team are to be congratulated on this accomplishment.

For those of us who have already voted with our time, effort and capital on the TRE concept, this is also a significant day.

Only if the Exchange itself succeeds will our early efforts have laid the groundwork for the establishment of significant Exchange-based businesses.

If TRE ultimately fails it will not be because of a failure of vision. If it ultimately succeeds it will have been in spite of the opposition of much of the traditional factoring community.

I am among the first to criticize and to point out what I perceive as flaws in TRE practices.

But I can only be complimentary of the founders’ identification of a potentially huge under-served market and their vision of a solution to one of the most widespread and pressing needs in the business community.

Too many within the traditional industry have been, in my opinion, unable to conceive of a solution on anything approaching the true scale of the problem.

TRE might be criticized for hubris and for being insensitive to the influential players in the current market.

But the truth is that the current industry leaders haven’t produced a potential solution that even approaches the creativity and vision of the Exchange’s.

This is a day that the entire TRE team can celebrate and an accomplishment in which they can take well-deserved pride.

But tomorrow it’s back to work with an even steeper hill to climb!