Blend Network widened company losses last year
Blend Network’s company losses widened by £226,076 last year, according to new records filed with Companies House.
The property lender made a total loss of £688,538 in the 12 months ending 30 June 2021.
During the previous 12 months, Blend made a £462,462 loss, while the company made a loss of £81,405 for the 12 months ending 30 June 2019.
Last year, Blend’s chief executive Yann Murciano told Peer2Peer Finance News that the platform’s losses had widened due to reinvestment to win market share.
Since then, the platform has been on a growth drive, launching new products, raising equity funds, and hiring new staff.
In September of last year, Blend Network launched a new development finance product with up to 75 per cent loan-to-gross development value and up to 90 per cent loan-to-cost. It also debuted a new development finance product with a built-in sales guarantee.
And earlier this year the platform announced that it had raised £10m in an oversubscribed funding round led by venture capital investor Nico Paraskevas, a former senior executive at Glencore, and backed by existing investors including OakNorth Bank chair Cyrus Ardalan, and co-founder of macro hedge fund Brevan Howard Jean-Philippe Blochet.
The equity fundraise meant that less than 10 per cent of the platform’s funding came from restricted retail investors.
Murciano said that the £10m investment would be used to scale its origination team, strengthen its lending capacity, and invest more money in its technology.
Earlier this month, Blend Network recruited Assetz Capital’s former relationship director Chris Mason to its lending team as lending director, with a remit to expand the company’s broker network and deploy investor funds.
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