kennek has secured a £10.2 million seed funding round to revolutionise the alternative lending space.
The London-based FinTech’s mission is to eliminate the complexity and inefficiency that has for years held back the huge non-bank lending sector.
It says that until now, lenders have had to rely on Excel and a jumble of unconnected tools and data. As well as being costly and time-consuming, this fails to leverage developments in open banking, open finance and payments.
kennek’s vertical SaaS offering covers every aspect of a lender’s operations, from loan underwriting to monitoring, servicing and investor reporting. It describes this as a ‘single point of truth’ for lenders, borrowers and investors.
The round was led by HV Capital and supported by Dutch Founders Fund, AlbionVC, FFVC, and Plug & Play Ventures and Syndicate One.
Having already achieved strong traction in the UK, the raise will also be used to expand its geographic reach into continental Europe following the recent signing of its first client there.
“Lenders are really just at the start of the digitalisation journey. kennek is here to help accelerate that journey and provide them with the tools to capitalise on the growth of the non-bank lending space,” said Xavier De Pauw, co-founder.
“Until kennek, lenders had to devote countless hours to menial operational tasks and deal with jumbled and hard-coded data – which makes every other part of lending a headache. As former lenders ourselves, we lived and breathed these frustrations, and built kennek to make them a thing of the past.”
His fellow co-founder Thibault Lancksweert added: “One of the unique things about the kennek platform is that it can cater for all different types of B2B loans: bridge & development loans, SME term loans, R&D and grant advances… to name just a few. And we’re seeing strong demand across the board.
“We’ve received some fantastic client feedback to date – my personal favourite was a lender saying that ‘the kennek platform is life-changing’. We are excited to use this fundraise to further develop our offering, broaden our reach and get feedback like that from hundreds more lenders. This is just the beginning.”