A European business financing marketplace has revealed plans to expand in its most important market – the UK.
Levenue is a Europe-wide marketplace where companies with recurring revenue are able to access affordable and non-dilutive financing to accelerate their company’s growth.
The business, founded in 2021 and headquartered in the Netherlands, is looking to open an office in the UK next year. It expects that more than 50% of its workforce will be based here in the future.
Co-founder and COO Zahra Alubudi has already moved to London. “We are hoping to have more than 50% of the team there, open an office next year, and are planning on potentially setting up a legal base in the UK,” she tells BusinessCloud.
“The UK holds the majority of our senior staff and marketplace operations. In the future, we will continue to expand here as it’s a core place to find high-value talent.
“We base most of our meetings out of London… I moved to the UK to accelerate Levenue’s presence in this market.”
Levenue has now raised €8 million in Series A funding, led by Truffle Capital with participation from Freshmen Fund, to accelerate its growth. It has also acquired bank transaction enrichment expert Cake to boost the efficiency and accuracy of its underwriting.
“The UK is the largest market for Levenue, both for the buy-side and the sell-side,” explains Alubudi. “The UK has, by far, the largest quantity and also the biggest companies in terms of revenue in the SaaS space, which is why it was the first country we expanded to after the Benelux.
“Also, for the buy-side, the UK holds the largest pools of institutional money in the EU, and most global asset managers also have a presence in London.”
Instead of offering capital in return for shares that dilutes founders’ control of their business, subscription-based companies can use the forecasted cash flow of their existing subscriptions as collateral for financing.
Investors have now deployed over $300m to subscription-based companies through Levenue’s marketplace since launch.
Further benefits to company founders include the speed of financing: it takes just 48 hours to assess companies for funding, Levenue claims, with funds typically received within three days of being launched.
Underwriting decisions are also based exclusively on qualitative data – such as revenue growth and accounting data – eliminating any potential of bias in the financial assessment.
Currently operating profitably in 12 countries across Europe, Levenue has grown its team by over 200% in 12 months, while also building artificial intelligence and machine learning into its underwriting solutions to rapidly scale operations with maximum capital efficiency.
Patrick Lord, senior partner of Truffle Capital’s FinTech practice, commented: “Founders of subscription-based SMEs need new solutions to fuel their growth. The complexity, founder distraction, and sheer time and effort needed to finance companies via traditional means can harm the business, and sometimes kill it.
“We believe strongly in Levenue’s mission to make it as simple, transparent and fast as possible for founders to leverage their primary value driver, their subscription volumes, to accelerate the growth of their companies in the most agile and painless way possible.”
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