Iwoca secures £270m in debt funding

Iwoca has received £150m in debt financing commitments from Citibank and Insight Investment to back its growth in Germany, and a further £120m from Barclays and Värde for the UK business.

The investment follows £200m in funding from Barclays and Värde Partners in October last year and £170m from Pollen Street Capital in January this year.

Iwoca was launched in 2021 and has provided £3bn in loans to SMEs in the UK and Germany.

The company said that, in the first quarter of this year, it had lent over £200m across 9,000 business loans in the UK and Germany.

The firm added that it has been growing its share of the lending market through “embedded finance technology”, and had grown its partners with new platform partners including Qonto and Countingup.

Christoph Rieche, Iwoca’s CEO and co-founder, said: “This investment will enable us to keep up with the high demand from small businesses for our flexi-loan product. Business owners choose us over high-street banks because we make faster lending decisions, typically within 24 hours, and our loan terms are much more flexible.

“Both of these features are crucial for small business owners, and are only possible due to the technology we have developed over the last decade. With more than 130,000 small business loans processed, we have ample data to build market-leading risk models.

“This data-driven approach also allows us to lend to businesses that are outside the restrictions imposed by the high-street banks, especially when they don’t have multiple years of trading.”