Lending Platform October Raises Funding For SMB Loans

Lending marketplace October worked with major investors and raised €258 million (close to $303 million) over the summer to fund loans to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the company said in a  blog post.

October is adding state guaranteed loans to its platform, alongside non-guaranteed loans and its financial leasing product. After five years in operation, October “wants to make life easier for entrepreneurs and to guide them efficiently towards the source of financing that best suits them,” the post says.

Olivier Goy, founder and CEO of October, said the investments “were all attracted by October’s technology, which allows them to deploy large amounts of money efficiently.”

And October COO Patrick de Nonneville said the money “is immediately available for the companies involved in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, all in an ultra simple and fast process, which is the trademark of October’s loan technology,” according to the release.

The €258 million will be used to add new products to October’s range, including a classic loan product that will allow for additional financing of €20 million for small and medium-sized businesses around Europe, and a product for the tourism sector that will allow for €38 million financing from six major insurance companies and the CDC (Caisse des Dépôts) in France, to allow for the reopening of tourism needs.

And, there’s the state guaranteed loans for Italian SMBs, which will help businesses in that country via €200 million in financing from Italy’s largest banking group, Gruppo Intesa Sanpaolo. That funding will be dispersed by the end of the year from October’s Instant Project technology.

The funding could be a boon for the pandemic-ravaged economy — businesses in the European Union are taking the time to prepare for a recession. That’s due to the diminished revenues, loss of tourism and outgoing payments and a widening gap in how long it’s taking for B2B payments to be made, taking as much as 14 days now when it used to take six at most.