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Northeastern University graduate Melissa Withers enjoys challenges, whether it’s amateur boxing or helping dozens of companies move from initial market entry to meaningful scale.
In a world where venture capital seems to get all the attention, Withers founded RevUp, one of the first revenue-based funds for early stage companies.
The goal is to unlock value that is hard to unlock during traditional equity investing, says Withers, who adds that she is “deeply committed to supporting founders who build their businesses without the perks of privilege.”
In return for a small percentage of a company’s revenue, RevUp invests $300,000 to $500,000 as well as strategic expertise to help founders scale from $1 million to $10 million.
“Revenue-based investing has been around for a very long time, but not in entrepreneurship,” she says. “Early stage companies need money, but they also need smart money. And they need competent investors who understand what they’re going through and have networks and resources that they can bring to the table to help them succeed.”
Since its founding in 2016, RevUp has invested in more than 60 companies, earning Withers a Women Who Empower Innovator Award from Northeastern in 2023.
Seventy percent of RevUp companies are led by women or people of color, a point of pride for Withers, who says she grew up in a working-class family and was the first in her family to graduate from college.
She says she appreciated the applied learning she obtained at Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, where she earned a graduate degree in science and technical communications.
At Northeastern, Withers was introduced to people at her future workplace, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Hired as an administrative assistant in the department of public affairs, she rose to become assistant director of the department.
When she went into the investing field, Withers says she started out as a traditional equity investor. But after dozens of investments, she found herself frustrated by the constraints of the equity-only system.
“It’s not a bad system. It is just that it has a narrow lens that limits the ways we can define success,” Withers says.
Equity investors make money through exits. While large amounts of this kind of capital are needed in some circumstances, such as for new biomedical companies with breakthrough products or drugs, “99% of companies will never be good targets for that kind of funding,” she says.
Withers says when she spoke recently at Northeastern she advised young entrepreneurs to get educated about all the kinds of capital that founders can use to build businesses and to understand how different kinds of capital work in different circumstances.
Most of RevUp’s investment is in companies doing business with other businesses in health care, financial technology and software, although some of clients produce “physical products that are really innovative and interesting,” Withers says.
Withers, who has a blog and a podcast, (Un)Founded, has written that while not having wealthy friends and family to subsidize her entrepreneurial ambitions sometimes “held me back, they also made me a resilient operator, a dogged problem solver and hard working AF.”
Downtime is spent with her son and earning titles as a champion amateur boxer.
A former marathon runner, Withers says boxing forces her to focus on something other than the companies she is helping to grow.
“The nice thing about boxing, compared to running, is that running gives you a lot of time to talk to yourself. When you are boxing, you are not thinking about a company or what you should do at work. You are really in the moment.”
“For type A people, having ways to unplug is really important. In boxing, if you’re doing it right, you’re not thinking about lunch or whether you screwed up a meeting. You’re thinking about just surviving until the bell rings.”