Itria Ventures LLC

One Penn Plaza

Suite 4530
New York, NY 10119

Response Statement by Itria Ventures LLC and Biz2Credit Inc. to March 30, 2020 Article
April 3, 2020

The statement below is from Itria Ventures LLC (Itria) and its parent company, Biz2Credit
Inc. (Biz2Credit), and is in response the article written by Andrew Kerr in The Daily Caller online
publication entitled “EXCLUSIVE: As Coronavirus Crippled Small Businesses, Some Lenders
Pounced”. We dispute numerous facts and implications in this article, which, despite all facts to
the contrary, pushes the false premise that Itria has been unwilling to work with its customers
that have run into financial trouble as a result of the recent economic fallout from the COVID-19
outbreak. This is not the truth.

What is the truth is that we have deep and longstanding relationships with our customers
and continually work with them to help ensure that they are able to operate their businesses
successfully. Since 2007, we have been offering online funding resources for small businesses
that have difficulty obtaining financing from traditional sources, such as brick-and-mortar banks.
We have provided approximately $3 billion in funding to thousands of customers and are known
for our funding products, educational resources for business such as the BizAnalyzer, and
research that we publish periodically, including the Small Business Lending Index. We are a
minority-owned business that has long championed the rights of minority-owned and women-
owned businesses. Our long-standing mission is to partner with and support our merchant
customers rather than try to tear them down. This approach has always been true, and is all the
more true as we all collectively deal with the traumatic crisis we are suffering through now.

Providing some background on what led up to this response is important. Immediately

after the release of the article, we contacted The Daily Caller and informed them of the numerous
untrue statements and implications about our company and our relationships with our customers
in the article, and urged them to do the right thing and take the article down. On March 31st,
The Daily Caller issued a limited retraction of certain statements in the original article. This
included the statement that Itria required one merchant identified in the article to sign
Confessions of Judgment, which is outright false. The Daily Caller did not, however, take the
article down. On April 2nd, they invited us to write a responsive statement, agreeing to post that
statement on The Daily Caller’s website and to link it to the original article. Although we had
hoped that The Daily Caller would retract the article entirely, which it did not, we feel that it is
critical to provide The Daily Caller’s readers a fair characterization of our innovative and business-
friendly company.

The Daily Caller’s March 30 article unfairly painted us as a funder that engages in improper
practices, falsely stating that we have been taking advantage of COVID-19 related business
interruption. Nothing could be further from the truth.
 The handful of the merchants in question had originally breached their obligations to Itria
much earlier than the COVID-19 outbreak impacting their businesses, with most such breaches
occurring in 2019. Most of the lawsuits identified in the article were the result of situations
where the merchants had admittedly breached their financing agreements for reasons unrelated
to the COVID-19 outbreak, and where Itria was simply securing its rights in the ordinary course
of business. As is nearly always the case, we had been working with these customers to
accommodate their changing circumstances and financing needs, and we were already in the
process of withdrawing a number of these suits prior to those businesses being contacted by The
Daily Caller’s reporter.

One merchant covered in the article in particular, Paul Hansen, Jr. and his company was
unable to remit payment to Itria as required under the funding agreement in December 2019,
well before the crisis emerged in Kansas City, and the reason was because he took financing from
two other funders after Itria and overextended his company, without our approval or knowledge
(and in violation of the funding agreements). In fact, Mr. Hansen himself told us this on February
19, 2020, well before the COVID-19 crisis had any effect on his business. In the email, he stated
that his company could not remit payments to Itria because he had become indebted to other
funders, in breach of his agreement with Itria, “I cannot cover the additional catch up payments.
It’s just not possible. We can go forward with the reduced payments as discussed as they will
clear but with the extra catch up payments and the mistake by the other two lenders and now
our acct is $1000 in the hole. I just have no way to manage that right now.” This situation had
nothing to do with the COVID-19 crisis, and The Daily Caller’s implication otherwise is entirely
false and misleading.

The article also states that “Itria sued another business, an Arizona-based restaurant
chain, for $282,000 on March 19 after failing to remit payments ‘beginning on or about March
18.’” This merchant, who is an attorney, had contacted us and stated that the reason he was
going to stop paying was because he was seeking refinancing. Yet the merchant would not
provide any documentation or any timeframe for this. Like Mr. Hansen’s company, the reason
this merchant stopped paying had nothing to with the COVID-19 outbreak, and was a clear breach
of our agreement. Since then, we have reached an amicable resolution with that merchant and
have provided him with a letter of good standing.

The bottom line here is: we overwhelmingly maintain excellent relationships with our
customers, even those that experienced payment issues.

Another factual assertion in the March 30 article that is completely incorrect is The Daily
Caller’s description of the “kicker” in its contracts after a customer misses daily payments. In all
of Itria’s future receivables sale agreements, mere nonpayment is not only not a contract breach
if the merchant itself has a reduction in business, it is expressly excluded as a breach.

Finally, we are particularly offended by the quote at the end of the article attributed to a
trial attorney named Shane Heskin, after incorrectly describing and characterizing our company
and our business practices: “‘Is this normal? Yeah, this is normal,’ Heskin said generally of the

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industry. ‘These guys are heartless, they’re ruthless.’” While we do not know Mr. Heskin and
cannot say whether he was referring in any way to Biz2Credit and Itria, The Daily Caller’s choice
to include that quote in a piece in which no other funders are named, clearly and unfairly implies
that Biz2Credit and Itria are indistinguishable from the “bad actors” in the industry.

Contrary to the implications of the article, we recognize that the tragic COVID-19
pandemic has upended many of our customers’ industries and business models. This is why we
are actively working with hundreds of our customers to address the unprecedented economic
slowdown due to the pandemic, including adjusting their payments and helping them, as well as
our new customers, to obtain new business funding opportunities to strengthen their businesses.
We have a long track record of working with our customers in difficult and unexpected times to
maximize value (and keep personnel employed).

We encourage The Daily Caller’s readers to visit Biz2Credit’s website to learn more about
our company, especially our “In the News” page, which offers fair and balanced articles about
Biz2Credit published by Forbes, CNBC, the Associated Press, and Yahoo! Finance, among many
others. And if The Daily Caller or any other small businesses need financial assistance or have
questions about finance available to them during the Covid-19 outbreak, we invite them to access
our free Covid-19 Resource Center, which includes a webinar and disaster hotline.

We’re here to help!

- Itria and Biz2Credit