Irish P2P firm Flender raises €75 million in funding
Irish peer-to-peer (P2P) lending firm Flender has raised €75 million in funding to boost its SME lending strategy.
Flender completes its eighth funding round
Founded in 2014, Flender went live with its lending platform in 2017 and claims to have thus far funded more than €14 million in in loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It offers loans of between €15,000 and €250,000.
This is the company’s third round of debt financing, after it received €10 million in June 2019 and April 2018 respectively. It has raised a total of €109 million over eight funding rounds since 2015.
It’s backed by Eiffel Investment Group, Enterprise Ireland, entrepreneur Mark Roden and former Ireland rugby player Jamie Heaslip.
“Before we got this new funding line, we had two main unique selling points over banks and that is speed of execution and a better user experience,” co-founder Kristjan Koik tells The Irish Times.
“But now, as well as having significant additional funding available we’ve cut our rates so that it is now as cheap, if not cheaper to come to us.”
According to a report from the Bank of Ireland, the top three market lenders to SMEs in the country control a 90.3% share of the industry, while rejection rates sit at around 15%.
