Rho Announces $100 Million Debt Financing

Rho Technologies has announced a $100 million debt financing from global impact investment firm, Community Investment Management (CIM), which will go toward new strategic investments and broaden its service offering to business clients, a press release emailed to PYMNTS said on Thursday (April 29).

Some of those business clients will include direct-to-consumer furniture company Burrow, collaboration software company Popular Pays and direct-to-consumer home goods company Caraway, the release noted.

“Our ability to secure $100 million in financing this early in our growth trajectory reflects investors’ confidence in our strategy to modernize business banking, a $700 billion … industry in desperate need for innovation,” said Khang Nguyen, head of Credit and Capital Markets at Rho.

Rho Technologies is the fintech behind Rho Business Banking. Based in New York City, it works on helping business teams work better together. The company works on both collaborative finance software and commercial-grade banking, and helps with saving time and money for businesses.

The news comes as Rho has also closed a $15 million Series A funding round. The company has also recently launched an integrated accounts payable feature as part of its business banking platform. Rho Business Banking “has built a modern commercial banking platform built around the way companies operate today: distributed, team-oriented, transparent and built for scale,” the release said.

The release noted that Rho has had a 50 percent boost in transaction volume since December 2020. The company has also raised around $20 million of equity capital from institutional investors, including Inspired Capital, M13 Ventures, ConsenSys, and Torch Capital.

“We are proud to support Rho’s endeavor to modernize business banking to create a more inclusive financial ecosystem, one that serves not just large commercial businesses but also smaller high-growth firms with first-class services that are generally inaccessible to them,” said Jacob Haar, co-founder and managing partner of CIM. “We are looking forward to this partnership and what we can achieve together.”

Alex Wheldon, co-founder of Rho Technologies, said finance is usually the top point of friction in any organization.

He told PYMNTS recently that accounts payable (AP) functionality is unique because it’s not solely focused on the transaction itself. Instead, it’s more process-driven and involves some procurement, with high degrees of connection to other areas of enterprise and other business partners. Because of that, data integration becomes highly important, he said.