Kabbage Raises $135M To Boost Tech

Kabbage, the alternative small business lender, said Wednesday (Oct. 14) that it has raised $135 million through a Series E funding round, according to a company press release.

The company said that the round was led by Reverence Capital Partners, with participation from ING, Santander InnoVentures and Scotiabank. Kabbage said the recent investment marks “the first time in recent history” that several financial institutions of global size have invested in a U.S. financial technology company, which in part confirms the changing banking landscape.

The new money raised will be earmarked to boost the scale of the company’s lending platform and “offer stress-free funding to more small businesses.”

In its release, Kabbage said it has, in the four years since its launch, grown in size to offer more than $1 billion in annual funding to small enterprises.

Referencing the past year and a few milestones it deemed worthy of disclosing, Kabbage stated that it has grown daily small business lending to $5 million as of last month, up from $3 million earlier in the year.

[bctt tweet=”Kabbage is getting more of the green stuff.”]

Also, in March, the company said that it had partnered with analytics startup Orchard Platform in an effort to ease consumer loan creation via institutional lenders.

Those loans in turn stem — no pun intended — from the Karrot service that debuted at the end of 2014, with a loan size maximum of $35,000, with terms between three and five years. As the relationship stands, Kabbage crunches the data and then makes it accessible to users across Orchard’s marketplace, leaving the choice up to investors as to which loans they want to fund. The company also set up a licensing agreement through which it brought its technology to Kikka Capital, which is based in Australia and provides businesses in that region up to $100,000 in working capital.

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