Techdollar Raises $3M and Launches the First Lending Platform Built for Pre-IPO Employees

Techdollar today launched publicly and announced the close of a $3 million pre-seed round, introducing a credit platform that lets employees, founders, and early investors at high-growth private companies borrow against their pre-IPO equity without selling their shares or waiting for a liquidity event.

The funding round is led by No Limit Holdings, supported by ReforgeVC, and angels including Michael Egorov (Founder, Curve Finance) and Roy Learner (prev. Framework Ventures), with self-participation from co-founders Terence McMenamin and David Tollemache.

Ahead of launch, Techdollar built a pipeline of more than $100 million in qualified loan demand, out of over $400 million in total loan requests, from employees and investors across leading AI, aerospace, defense, robotics, and payments companies.

“Techdollar is well positioned at the cross-section of frontier tech RWAs and DeFi. The unlock is serving the native crypto community with highly sought after yield products derived from tech companies that are driving global productivity in the coming decade and beyond.”

Gin Chao, Founding Partner, No Limit Holdings

A wave of paper wealth employees still can’t touch

The problem Techdollar solves became impossible to ignore this month. When SpaceX went public on June 12, an estimated 4,400 current and former employees crossed into millionaire territory, many of them engineers, technicians, and tradespeople paid in equity for years. But for most of those years, that wealth existed only on a screen: they could not sell it, borrow against it, or use it.

Most of the companies defining the next economic cycle are still in that earlier stage, and their employees are stuck in exactly that position. The combined valuation of the world’s leading private AI companies now exceeds $2.7 trillion, while the path to IPO for companies valued above $500 million has stretched past a decade. According to Evercore, secondary transactions reached a record $226 billion in 2025, yet traditional lenders have done little to help — routinely declining borrowers below large collateral thresholds and extending pre-IPO credit only to senior executives.

“The financial system was never built for the early employees who help build and scale these companies. Employee number three should have the same access to their own wealth as the CEO. Banks price this equity like a speculative bet, but the secondary market proves it isn’t. We’re correcting that mispricing and doing it at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives.”

Terence McMenamin, Co-Founder and CEO, Techdollar

How it works

The model is closer to a mortgage than a venture bet. Just as a mortgage lets homeowners put their most valuable asset to work without selling it, Techdollar lets shareholders unlock liquidity from their equity while keeping full ownership and all future upside. Borrowers retain their shares, avoid a taxable sale, and face no restrictions on how they use the funds.

Backed by real-time secondary market data and audited ownership verification, Techdollar funds loans in 24–48 hours against equity in companies across AI, quantum computing, robotics, aerospace, defense, and frontier technology.

“Trillions in value is locked inside the world’s most valuable private companies, and as they stay private longer, that gap only widens. Techdollar is building the credit layer that finally unlocks it. Terence and David are an elite team uniquely suited to build it.”

Alexander Lin, Reforge

Integrations and availability

Techdollar is already integrated as a Pulley perk and is in integration discussions with Carta, two of the leading equity management platforms, with the goal of making equity-backed lending a standard benefit for employees at late-stage technology companies. The pre-seed funding will be used to accelerate platform development, build out the product and business teams, and deepen financial integrations and partnerships.

Techdollar is now live at techdollar.com.