U.K.-based FinTech Kennek has raised $4.5 million in its pre-seed round.
In a Thursday (Feb. 9) LinkedIn post announcing the fresh funding, Xavier De Pauw, founder and co-CEO at Kennek, said the round was led by Dutch Founders Fund, FF Venture Capital and Plug and Play Ventures.
Founded in 2021, Kennek develops software for alternative lenders. Its solution is designed to digitize and automate various lending processes, creating a single operating system for lenders to manage borrowers and loans from inception through to disbursement.
The startup also integrates a credit marketplace where lenders and investors can buy and sell individual loans and credit portfolios. The types of loans Kennek’s platform gives investors access to include small- to medium-sized business (SMB) loans and real estate loans.
“Our ultimate goal is to supercharge the growth of alternative lenders with complete, easy-to-use software,” the company said in Friday’s LinkedIn post.
As quoted in De Pauw’s post, Laurens Groenendijk, co-founder at Dutch Founders Fund and Just Eat, said: “The uniquely designed product and lending rails that Kennek is creating will make it much easier for lenders worldwide to launch, operate and scale.”
The kind of FinTech lenders that make up Kennek’s client base are becoming increasingly important in the SMB financing space.
PYMNTS has reported that FinTechs in Europe the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are now major SMB lenders and have proven attractive to investors in recent weeks. In 2023 so far, funding rounds in the space have been raised by Liberis, Iwoca, Lulalend and MNT-Halam.
The largest of them was raised by the Egyptian FinTech MNT-Halam, which announced $400 million worth of investment earlier this month, to help fund its microbusiness and SMB lending platform, among other financial services it offers.
Demand for alternative SMB lending services comes at a time when SMB loans have become less common and more expensive.
In the U.K., for example, PYMNTS reported that less than half of SMB loan applications were successful during the third quarter of 2022.
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