Our mission
To empower Hawaiʻi business owners with accessible working capital, practical education, and trusted relationships that help them respond to immediate needs, pursue growth opportunities, and build stronger, more sustainable businesses.
Our vision
A thriving Hawaiʻi economy where local businesses — regardless of size, industry, or access to traditional financing — have the knowledge, relationships, and capital needed to grow, create opportunities, support their communities, and contribute to a more resilient future for Hawaiʻi.
A Hawaiʻi where a good business doesn’t fail for lack of a few weeks’ capital.
Why we started HMF
We’re family, and Hawaiʻi is home.
In these islands neither of those is a figure of speech. Family here is not a list of individuals — it extends, and it includes. The people we call family, and the ones who have called us theirs, are the reason any of this exists.
Hawaiʻi has never been just a home to us. It’s communities where people still know each other’s names, and a relationship to the land and to each other that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
What we came back to was harder than what we left.
Families who have been here for generations are leaving — not because they want to, but because the arithmetic stopped working. We have watched friends go. We have watched people who grew up here decide they can’t afford to raise their own children here.
And we watched the businesses. Local owners working harder than they have ever worked, for the same three things: capital they can actually get, enough visibility that people know they exist, and workers who can afford to stay. The last one is the same problem as the first, one step removed. People leave, and the businesses that needed them go short.
In Hawaiʻi this isn’t a sector problem. Roughly 99.3% of the businesses in this state are small ones. They aren’t part of the economy — they are the economy. When they struggle, it isn’t a statistic. It’s a family, then a street, then a town, then an island.
We knew we couldn’t fix most of that. We thought we could fix one part of it.
We’ve watched friends close businesses that should still be open.
One of them was a family business: twenty-five years in the same community. Real customers, real revenue, a name people knew, a place we loved. It didn’t close because it was a bad business. It closed because the money it needed didn’t arrive in time — and by the time an answer came, the answer didn’t matter anymore.
We have watched it happen over and over since.
Hawaiʻi is among the hardest places in the country to run a business. Freight, wages, seasonality, and an economy where most businesses are small — small enough that the funding system built to evaluate them was never really designed for them at all.
You know how it goes. You spend hours pulling together documents. You send them. They’re reviewed, slowly. More questions come. Credit gets pulled. More documents. Days become weeks. And then, eventually, a no. Most of that system was built to serve businesses that already have capital.
Here’s the part that stays with people: that answer was decided before any of it started. The model was looking at what your business looked like historically, and if the history didn’t fit the shape it was built to recognize, nothing you sent in the weeks afterward was going to change it. The process wasn’t evaluating you. It was confirming a conclusion.
Everyone says they look at the whole picture. Most systems aren’t built to. They’re built to check a business against a pattern from the past — and that is a genuinely useful thing to do when you’re lending six figures over five years. It’s the wrong instrument for a business that needs to know this week.
We look at the situation as it actually sits right now — the market, the business, and the people running it. Money in, money out, this month rather than last year. It’s a clearer picture of whether a business is sound, and it can be seen in days rather than months.
Which means we can look, decide, and fund quickly.
For a business that can’t wait weeks for capital that might never come, that is the whole difference.
Laulima
(many hands working together) — We work alongside our businesses, not across a desk from them.
Akamai
(smart) — Working smart so funding stays simple for you.
Kuleana
(responsibility) — We take our obligations to Hawaiʻi’s businesses seriously.
Hoʻomau
(perseverance) — Staying with our businesses through every season.
The people
Who we are, and who we answer to
Hawaii Merchant Funding was started by people who live here, for a reason that has less to do with finance than with what happens to a town when its businesses close.
We’ve watched it. A business twenty-five years in the same community goes under — not because it was a bad business, but because the money it needed came too late, or came with an answer that was decided before anyone read the file. Then the people who worked there leave. Then their kids grow up somewhere else. In these islands that isn’t an economic story. It’s a family story, and it repeats street by street.
So we built a firm whose job is to be the yes that arrives in time — and the honest no, when no is the right answer. We look at a business as it actually is right now: what comes in, what goes out, who’s running it. We explain every cost before anyone signs. And we stay reachable after the money lands, because in Hawaiʻi you will see us again — at the chamber mixer, at the farmers market, at the counter of the business next door.
That last part is the point. HMF is not a company that happens to be in Hawaiʻi. It is accountable to Hawaiʻi. Our team is the people who own it — a family that grew up here, left, and came back — but it is also the nine chambers we belong to, the business owners who vouch for us, and the accountants, suppliers and advisors who send someone our way because they trust how we’ll treat them. In a place where trust travels through people, that is what a team is.
We don’t fund a business just because we can. We fund what a business can carry — and sometimes that means less than was asked for — because the goal was never the transaction. It was the business still being open next year, with the same family running it, in the same town.
That’s why we started. That’s who we work for.
In the community
Member: Chamber of Commerce Hawaii · Small Business Chamber of Commerce Hawaii · Native Hawaiian Chamber of Commerce · Hawaiian Council · Kaneohe Business Group · North Shore Chamber of Commerce · Maui Chamber of Commerce · Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce · Kauaʻi Chamber of Commerce
Where a license is required, we verify it.
Licensing verification is part of how we underwrite — always has been. It protects the businesses we fund and the people who rely on them. We verify for our own underwriting. We don’t warrant anyone’s work or their current standing — always check for yourself before you hire.
Let’s talk story.
or call (808) 848-3403, Monday–Thursday 9:00 AM–5:00 PM HST · Friday 9:00 AM–4:00 PM HST
Locally owned · Honolulu-based · Answers in hours, not weeks · Every cost explained before you sign
Not an offer of funding; subject to application and underwriting review. HMF provides working capital through the purchase of future receivables — not a loan.