Flender hits €10m lending milestone and launches new funding round
IRISH peer-to-peer platform Flender has reached its €10m (£8.8m) lending milestone, less than two years after launching.
The lending landmark comes as the platform prepares its latest equity funding round, with the aim of raising €3.5m from investors across the UK and Ireland. These funds will be used to help expand the platform’s reach so that even more Irish businesses can benefit from access to Flender’s investor network.
Read more: Poised for growth
More than €8m has been channeled through the platform to fund small- and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) in the past six months alone.
“I am very proud of the Flender team for reaching the milestone of €10m in originations,” said Flender’s founder and chief executive Kristjan Koik.
“I would also like to thank our retail and institutional investors for their growing support. They helped Flender grow by more than 500 per cent in 2018 and we are on target to keep growing even faster this year.”
Read more: Flender bolsters board with former banking executives
Koik praised the platform’s recently-appointed head of sales Barry Hickey, and head of partnerships Colin Canny for the uptick in lending, and added that credit team head Colin Barry has “helped to ensure a high quality loan book.”
Flender was founded in 2017 and offers loans of between €15,000 and €250,000 to SMEs across Ireland. More than 11,000 investments have been completed on the platform to date, with investors earning average returns of 10.4 per cent per annum.
Koik added: “I’m looking forward to expanding our reach and making Flender finance available to a whole new world of borrowers and investors.”
Read more: Initiative Ireland enters UK P2P market with corporate accounts