Capital that moves
at the speed of the order.

Manufacturing runs on a structural cash-flow mismatch that no amount of profitability fixes. You win a purchase order. You buy steel, aluminum, resin, castings, or components — often at a supplier's terms of net 30 or cash on delivery. You burn labor and machine hours for four to ten weeks. You ship. Then you wait another 45 to 90 days for the OEM's accounts payable department to release the check. The order was profitable the day you quoted it, and yet the working capital hole between material purchase and invoice payment is the single most common reason a growing shop stalls out. Growth makes it worse, not better: every new order widens the gap.

Traditional bank lending is poorly shaped for this. Banks want two years of tax returns, audited or reviewed financials, and a debt-service coverage ratio computed on a trailing period that may not resemble your current order book at all. They discount work-in-process inventory heavily and often refuse to lend against it. They take 45 to 90 days to close. Meanwhile the customer wanted parts last month and your material quote expires Friday. Legion was built for the shop whose opportunity is measured in lead times, not fiscal quarters.

What we fund inside a manufacturing business

Raw material for a specific order — bar stock, plate, coil, castings, forgings, resin, and the long-lead components that have to be on the floor before the first setup. Machine tool acquisition and the true cost around it: rigging, foundation work, power drops, fixturing and workholding, control retrofits, probing and tool-presetting, and the operator training that makes the asset productive rather than idle. Tooling and perishables — inserts, end mills, dies, molds, and the EDM consumables that scale directly with volume. Labor bridges when a program ramps faster than your receivables. Certification and quality-system costs, including ISO 9001, AS9100, IATF 16949, and the coordinate-measuring and inspection equipment that customer audits require. Facility expansion when the constraint is square footage rather than spindles.

What we don't ask for

We don't run hard credit pulls to check pricing. We don't ask for two years of tax returns or reviewed financials. We don't require collateral on positions under $250K. We don't demand a notice of assignment to your OEM customer on most deals, which matters because many shops would rather not signal a funding relationship to a program manager. We underwrite from bank statements, time in business, order flow, and customer mix — the variables that actually predict whether a shop repays.

A generic underwriting engine misreads a healthy manufacturer badly. The $80K wire to a steel service center reads as a cash drain rather than the input to a $240K order. The eight-week trough while a program tools up reads as revenue collapse. The lumpy deposit pattern — three large OEM checks a month instead of daily card batches — reads as inconsistency. Our underwriters know the difference. They look for the patterns that tell the real story: material outflows that lead deposits by a predictable interval; end-of-month balances that hold rather than zero out; NSF counts that stay in single digits despite heavy ACH activity; and a receivables rhythm that matches the customer's known payment behavior.

We also calibrate to your work mix. A high-mix low-volume job shop cutting one-offs and prototypes has short cycles, fast turns, and diversified customers — that profile gets flexible working capital sized to deposit rhythm. A low-mix high-volume production shop running a long OEM program has predictable revenue but heavy concentration risk — that profile gets a longer term with more conservative sizing. A fabricator running project work with progress billing gets a structure anchored to the billing schedule. Many shops run more than one of these books at once, and we can blend instruments so daily operating cost and large program mobilizations are funded separately.

Manufacturing segments we fund every week

CNC machine shops and precision job shops from $500K to $25M in annual revenue. Sheet-metal fabricators and weldments houses. Contract manufacturers serving medical device, industrial, and consumer OEMs. Plastic injection molders and thermoformers. Tool, die, and mold shops. Metal stamping and progressive-die operations. Castings, forging, and foundry operations. Plating, anodizing, heat-treating, powder-coating, and other finishing houses. Electronics and PCB assembly shops. Food and beverage co-packers. Cabinet, millwork, and furniture manufacturers. Industrial equipment builders and machine integrators.

Common manufacturing funding scenarios

An OEM doubles a release quantity with six weeks of lead time and you need $180K of material on the floor before your supplier's quote expires. We fund the material buy in 48 hours; the position pays back as the invoices clear. A second-shift opportunity appears — the work exists, the spindles exist, and the constraint is eight operators and the payroll to carry them for sixty days until the receivables catch up. We bridge the labor ramp. A used machining center comes up at auction at 40 percent of new and settlement is due in five business days. We wire the purchase and the rigging cost; a titled equipment note could not have closed in time. A prime contractor stretches from net 45 to net 90 unilaterally and your material supplier does not care about their AP policy. We bridge the gap so the relationship survives the squeeze. An AS9100 or IATF audit requires inspection equipment and documented process capability before a program award. We fund the CMM and the certification cost against the award that follows.

The pattern is consistent across all of it. In manufacturing, the order arrives before the capital does, and the shops that scale are the ones that can say yes without waiting on a bank committee.