PayU Invests €110M In Kreditech; Becomes Minority Investor

Kreditech, the online lender in Germany, has reportedly landed a €110 million investment from online payment processor PayU.

According to a report, under the deal, PayU gets a large minority stake in Kreditech and builds on a twelve-month pilot program in Poland in which more than €10 million in instant credit was issued to consumers at the point of sale.

As part of the deal, Kreditech will provide its AI and machine learning credit underwriting and loan management technology to PayU’s 300,000 network of merchants.

“In the past 12 months, we have become the leading corporate venture capital investor in FinTech, investing more than €245 million around the world. This latest investment in Kreditech fits perfectly with this vision,” said Laurent Le Moal, chief executive of PayU.

PayU is the ePayment subsidiary of media conglomerates Naspers. The company joins JC Flowers, Varde, Blumberg Capital, HPE, Peter Thiel, Rakuten and the World Bank’s IFC as an investor in Kreditech.

In March of 2016, Kreditech raised $11 million through a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised at the time to $103 million after raising $92 million in September of 2015. Among investors in that round were PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel, HPE Growth Capital and Amadeus Capital Partners, among others. The leader of the round was private equity firm J.C. Flowers.

The newest funding will be geared toward developing a new product — a platform and app known as Monedo. The new service helps consumers find and apply for loans and credit and also has a relatively larger set of banking offerings to provide to those applicants, including digital wallet capabilities. Monedo also uses the online data points referenced above. The mindset of having so many data points is that, with a larger set of data, accuracy in attractiveness of loans is likely well-founded.