Crowdfunding and investment round-up: 13 May 2016
Tandem reveals its numbers
With news on crowdfunding and investment appearing with relentless regularity, here’s a round-up of key events to save you time.
UK challenger bank Tandem has now revealed the money it’s raised and its valuation – all in preparation for a crowdfunding campaign that starts on 20 May. Money raised comes to £22 million and it has been valued at £65 million.
Tandem received its banking licence on 30 November 2015, but is yet to launch. It selected the Agiliti technology platform from core system provider Fiserv.
From one island to another. Japan-based financial services firm SBI Holdings is looking to build a fintech venture fund.
The company has so far raised JPY 20 billion ($183 million) of its JPY 30 billion ($275 million) target.
SBI is looking to invest in start-ups and existing companies, and has expressed an interest in start-ups using blockchain. But it is not limited to blockchain only, as it has also said firms in the big data and payments sectors are open to investment.
AvantCredit, the UK subsidiary of Avant and an online technology lending platform, has secured debt financing totalling £130 million from a number of financial institutions. This brings its total UK debt funding since inception to over £300 million.
The financing from this deal will be used to fund AvantCredit’s loans. The company focuses on providing personal loans to “middle income customers”.
Raj Singh, MD of AvantCredit, says: “We are not a peer-to-peer lender, so securing balance sheet funding is crucial to our success [and] we have ambitious plans for the UK.”
The company has issued more than 60,000 loans in the UK to date totalling more than £150 million.
Srikanth Velamakanni, Fractal
Khazanah Nasional, the sovereign wealth fund of the Government of Malaysia, is investing $100 million in US-based Fractal Analytics, a provider of analytics, to “accelerate its growth”.
Fractal’s co-founder and CEO Srikanth Velamakanni says the investment will allow the company to speed up development of its artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning-based software stack.
European stock exchange Euronext has unveiled its strategic plan “Agility for Growth” – namely its growth ambitions to 2019.
These plans include both organic growth, using its existing assets, and through “selected bolt-on” acquisitions. The overall amount allocated to development costs and these acquisitions will be between €100 and €150 million over the period.
This move is seen as its attempt to challenge Deutsche Börse and the London Stock Exchange, who recently reached agreement on the terms of an all-share merger of “equals”.
