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Christoph Rieche, co-founder and CEO of iwoca |
The flow of venture capital investment into fintech disruptors to the banking industry continues, as these new providers seek to boost funding to small and medium-size businesses that have been poorly served by traditional lenders.
Iwoca (it stands for instant working capital), one of the fastest growing SME lending platforms in Europe, carried out a $20 million Series B equity financing round led by Acton Capital Partners, the specialist German venture capital firm, and CommerzVentures, the corporate venture capital subsidiary of Commerzbank in July. Redline Capital and other existing investors also participated.
The funds raised will be leveraged up through iwoca’s own credit facilities, mainly with institutional investors into $150 million of lending capacity to support rapid expansion of iwoca’s UK operations and further enlarge its presence across Europe, notably in Germany, Spain and Poland.
“Our mission is to fund the millions of small businesses across Europe that have annual turnovers in the hundreds of thousands of euros and typically less than 10 employees,” Christoph Rieche, co-founder and CEO of iwoca, tells Euromoney. “These are online and offline retailers, restaurants, cleaners, small professional service firms: not the medium-size businesses with turnovers of €2 million and up which are the typical focus of the discussion around boosting lending to SMEs.”
