iwoca announced £1bn milestone on funding SMEs

One of Europe’s largest business lenders iwoca has announced that it has lent over £1 billion to small businesses since its launch in 2012.

The UK-based small business lender has now funded over 30,000 businesses since inception and made funding available to over 50,000 across a range of industries through its platform. In 2018, iwoca lent over £330 million – a record year representing a 90 percent year-on-year increase.

“This milestone is a huge achievement for iwoca” said Christoph Rieche, CEO and co-founder of iwoca.

“We’re humbled by the positive feedback received from thousands of businesses up and down the country, this really keeps us going. We’re already working on a few new products that will transform the way businesses access finance. We cannot wait to launch them.”

Since iwoca’s launch in 2012, the small business lender has raised £350 million in equity and debt finance as well as achieving an extensive track record of industry firsts such as launching a Lending API and being the first business lender to provide finance through OpenBanking.

In 2018, iwoca doubled its revenues to £48 million and reached profitability for the first time. Earlier this year iwoca announced that its number of new credit facility approvals equated to 12 percent of all UK small business overdraft approvals, overtaking Santander and HSBC.

In August 2019, iwoca was awarded £10 million from the Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF), as part of Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR). The grant will play a key role in expanding iwoca’s customer base to 150,000 and will help make £5 billion worth of loans available to support Britain’s SMEs.

As part of the fund, iwoca has committed to building innovative new products and to the introduction of OpenLending, a customisable “plug and play” platform for iwoca’s SME fintech partners across the UK.