Michael Fanfant grew up in Seattle. He studied economics at Stanford. Then he went to Capital One, where the job was corporate strategy and the education was learning how broken consumer lending actually is from the inside.
Most people who spot an industry problem from inside a large financial institution write a memo about it. Fanfant co-founded a company. In 2014, he and his partners launched Octane Lending - a point-of-sale financing platform built for one specific, unglamorous slice of the American consumer market: powersports. Motorcycles. Snowmobiles. ATVs. Jet skis. The vehicles that don't fit neatly into a bank's auto-loan box.
It was not the sector that landed on magazine covers. But the problem was real. Buyers of powersports vehicles often faced slow, clunky financing processes run through dealer networks that hadn't been updated in decades. Octane built the digital infrastructure to make that fast, fair, and online. Along the way, they launched Roadrunner Financial, a near-prime lending arm for buyers who didn't qualify for prime rates but weren't high-risk either - a segment the market largely ignored.
As COO, Fanfant owned strategy and customer acquisition. By August 2021, Octane had raised a Series D at a valuation north of $900 million. He still sits on the board.
Our job is to not only provide capital, but be a source of support and comfort for founders and try to help them navigate not only the business, but their journey, their emotional journey as founders.- Michael Fanfant, FinTech Silicon Valley Interview
From Operator to Investor
In 2017, Fanfant joined Runa Capital as a Partner. Runa is a firm with unusual geography: Luxembourg-headquartered, globally-minded, and unapologetically early-stage. Founded by Dmitry Chikhachev and colleagues with roots in the former Soviet tech ecosystem, Runa has backed companies including NGINX, MariaDB, Acumatica, Mambu, and Brainly - 119 portfolio companies across its history, with three unicorns, two IPOs, and twenty-five acquisitions.
Fanfant anchors the firm's United States strategy from Palo Alto. In 2022, he was promoted to General Partner alongside Konstantin Vinogradov, who leads the Europe desk. The promotion recognized what Fanfant had built: a consistent investment approach grounded in regulated industries and B2B SaaS, with the operational credibility of someone who has run a company through the difficult middle chapters.
The timing mattered. Runa launched its Opportunity Fund I in May 2022, raising $69 million by autumn of that year. The venture market was contracting. Valuations that had been inflated by COVID stimulus, public market enthusiasm, and what Fanfant described as a widespread belief in "permanent technological transformation" were coming back to earth.
It's no longer growth at all costs.- Michael Fanfant, London Fintech Podcast
Fanfant's read on the correction was direct: valuations were returning to 2015-2018 norms. For investors with discipline, that was an opportunity. For founders who had priced their rounds at 2021 levels, it was a reckoning.
What He Bets On - and Why
Ask Fanfant what he's looking for and he doesn't give you a category. He gives you a thesis. Regulated industries - fintech, edtech, digital health - are structurally underserved by software. The compliance requirements that make them hard to enter are exactly what makes them defensible once you're in. That asymmetry is the investment case.
Fintech / B2B Infrastructure
Point-of-sale financing, embedded payments, and financial infrastructure for vertical SaaS platforms. Attaching payments to a product deepens retention and builds a defensible moat.
Digital Health
Healthcare's regulatory complexity makes it slow to disrupt but extremely sticky once disrupted. Fanfant targets companies building the infrastructure layer, not just the consumer interface.
Edtech / Education
Education management and e-learning platforms where data, compliance, and enterprise sales cycles create high barriers - and high rewards for the right operator-backed founders.
Deep Tech
Runa's broader thesis extends into AI, robotics, and quantum computing - areas where technical differentiation creates long-term competitive advantage.
Early-Stage B2B SaaS
Businesses building tools for other businesses, with recurring revenue, predictable expansion economics, and an enterprise sales motion. The compounding math of ARR at scale.
Global Markets
Beyond North America, Fanfant actively scouts fintech opportunity in Asia, LATAM, and Africa - markets with large unbanked populations and infrastructure gaps that create room for fast movers.
The founder he backs looks a specific way: intellectually honest. Confident in the idea, grounded in research, but genuinely open to feedback from data and experience. Founders who mistake stubbornness for conviction are not what he's after. The ones who update on evidence while holding onto a strong directional view are.
Three Weeks Across Asia
In 2023, Fanfant did something that most VC investors talk about but rarely execute: he went to the markets he wanted to understand. He spent three weeks traveling across Asia, visiting Indonesia and Japan specifically, to assess how fintech was developing on the ground - not through secondhand research or LP updates, but through direct observation.
Indonesia's fintech market sits at the intersection of high mobile penetration, a large underbanked population, and a regulatory environment still being shaped in real time. Japan presents a different puzzle: a highly sophisticated financial system that remains stubbornly paper-based in many segments, creating pockets of opportunity for digitization plays that would seem obvious in Silicon Valley but require deep local navigation to execute.
His conclusion from the trip aligned with a thesis he had been developing for several years: markets that are inefficient and conducted via paper, with poor buyer-seller matching, represent the largest opportunity for fintech. Not the markets already saturated with apps, but the ones where analog processes still run at scale. Finding those markets, and backing the founders who understand them from the inside, is where the returns are.
Empathy as Strategy
Fanfant says something that sounds soft until you think about it for a minute: the venture capital industry systematically undervalues empathy.
His argument isn't sentimental. It's operational. Founders go through genuinely difficult periods - not just strategically, but personally. The decision fatigue, the isolation of leadership, the weight of carrying a company and a team. An investor who shows up only for board meetings and quarterly reviews is less useful than one who picks up the phone when things are hard.
For Fanfant, this isn't a sideline to the investment work. It's part of what makes a GP valuable. Capital is a commodity at the margin. The judgment, the network, and the availability during difficult moments are not. Founders who have lived through a hard quarter with a good board member know the difference.
Empathy is something that often is overlooked in the venture capital world.- Michael Fanfant, FinTech Silicon Valley
This view shapes how he evaluates relationships as much as how he evaluates companies. The investors he respects are the ones who were present when presence was hard. The founders he backs are the ones who think the same way about their teams.
Board Seats and Portfolio Footprint
Fanfant currently holds board seats at Revegy, a revenue performance management platform for enterprise sales teams; ClearMechanic, a SaaS platform helping auto dealerships manage service operations; and AppBuddy, a Salesforce ecosystem company. He remains on the board at Octane Lending as well.
The pattern is consistent: companies in regulated or operationally complex verticals, with enterprise customer bases, building software infrastructure that doesn't have obvious direct competition. Not because the market is small - because the problem is hard enough that most teams don't bother.
BLCK VC, Defy Ventures, and the Long Game
Fanfant's community work isn't decorative. As Events and Community Chair at BLCK VC, he leads programming specifically designed to increase the number of Black investors working in venture capital. BLCK VC runs mentorship, networking, and education programs aimed at a structural problem: the pipeline of diverse investors entering the industry is too thin to change the composition of firm leadership at the pace that would make a real difference.
The work matters for reasons that extend beyond optics. A venture capital ecosystem where investment decisions are made primarily by a narrow demographic slice of the population systematically misses categories of opportunity that other demographics understand by direct experience. BLCK VC's thesis - that diversity in the investor base produces better returns as well as better access - is one Fanfant has invested his time in proving.
At Defy Ventures, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs with formerly incarcerated individuals launching businesses, Fanfant works as a mentor and volunteer. The program matches people who have run successful businesses - or who are building them - with individuals whose access to opportunity has been structurally limited by the criminal justice system. It is applied entrepreneurship education, and it reflects the same instinct that shapes his VC work: empathy is not a soft add-on. It's load-bearing.
Career Timeline
Joined Capital One in a corporate strategy role, focused on retail banking growth, credit card partnerships, and the prepaid card industry. First close look at how consumer lending works - and where it breaks.
Co-founded Octane Lending as COO. Built a point-of-sale financing marketplace for powersports vehicles - motorcycles, jet skis, snowmobiles, ATVs - starting from a broken market and a hypothesis about digitization.
Launched Roadrunner Financial within the Octane Lending ecosystem - a near-prime lending product for powersports buyers who didn't qualify for prime rates, targeting a segment the market had left behind.
Joined Runa Capital as a Partner, based in Palo Alto. Began building the firm's US investment practice with a focus on early-stage regulated-industry software and B2B SaaS.
Octane Lending closed a Series D round at a valuation exceeding $900 million in August 2021, validating seven years of building in powersports fintech.
Promoted to General Partner at Runa Capital alongside Konstantin Vinogradov. Runa simultaneously launched Opportunity Fund I, raising $69M to double down on early-stage global tech.
Completed a three-week research trip across Asia - Indonesia and Japan - to assess emerging fintech markets firsthand before making cross-border investment decisions.
Five Things Worth Knowing
His company Octane Lending financed some of the most fun vehicles in America - motorcycles, jet skis, snowmobiles, and ATVs. Not a typical fintech pitch deck.
Originally from Seattle, WA - which makes him a rare Pacific Northwest native in the heart of Palo Alto VC.
He's a Kauffman Fellow (Class 27), part of a global network spanning 800+ VC leaders across 60+ countries.
As Events & Community Chair at BLCK VC, he runs programming specifically designed to get more Black investors into venture capital - structural change, not symbolic gestures.
He flew to Indonesia and Japan for three weeks - not for portfolio company visits, but purely to do market research on emerging fintech ecosystems from the ground up.