SMBs
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Kabbage, the AI-based small business loans platform backed by SoftBank and others, is adding more firepower to its lending machine: the Atlanta-based startup has secured an additional $200 million in the form of a revolving credit facility from an unnamed subsidiary of a large life insurance company, managed and administered by 20 Gates Management, and Atalaya Capital Management.
The money comes on the heels of a $700 million securitization Kabbage secured just three months ago and it is notable not just for its size but its terms: it’s a four-year facility, a length of time that underscores a level of confidence in the company’s performance.
Kabbage, which loans up to $250,000 in a single deal to small and medium businesses, has built a platform that harnesses the long tail of big data from across the web. It uses not just indicators from a company’s own public activities, but also sources comparative information from across a wider group of similar companies, with “2 million live data connections” currently helping to feed its algorithm.
Together, these help Kabbage determine whether to provide the loans, and at what rates. Notably, the whole process takes mere minutes, making Kabbage disruptive to the traditional route of applying for loans from banks, which can come at higher rates, often take longer to close and may never get approved.
The company was last valued at $1.2 billion in its most recent equity round from the Vision Fund in 2017, with about $500 million raised in equity to date from it and other investors, including BlueRun Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Rob Frohwein, the co-founder and CEO, confirmed to me via email that there are “no plans on the equity side right now.” We’ve asked about IPO plans and will update if we learn anything more on that front.
More importantly, alongside its equity story is the company’s business story: Kabbage has to date loaned out $7 billion in capital — amassed through securitizations and other facilities alongside that — to 185,000 businesses, and the company has seen an acceleration of business activity over the last two years. Nearly $700 million was loaned out in Q2 of this year, passing the record in Q1 of $600 million. This puts Kabbage on track to loan out between $2.4 billion and $3 billion this year.
“This transaction further diversifies Kabbage’s committed sources of funding and prepares us to meet the escalating demand for capital access among small businesses,” said Kabbage head of Capital Markets, Deepesh Jain, in a statement. “2019 has proven to be a tide-shifting year as customers accessed more than $670 million from Kabbage in Q2 2019, well surpassing our previously set record last quarter.”
While a lot of Kabbage’s business has come out of its direct consumer relationships, it’s also been expanding by way of more third-party relationships. It has white-label partnerships with banks to power their own loan offerings for SMBs, and earlier this year it was also tapped by e-commerce giant Alibaba to provide loans to its small business customers of up to $150,000 to help finance purchases, part of the latter company’s redoubled efforts to build out its business in the U.S. by way of its quiet acquisition of OpenSky.
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Kabbage, a company with some 115,000 customers and $3.5 billion in loans that has built an automated platform for lending money to small businesses and individuals using a large set of data points to determine a customer’s credit score, is announcing some big cabbage of its own today. SoftBank Group is investing $250 million in Kabbage — funding that Rob Frohwein, the co-founder… Read More
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Europe has seen a large wave of startup banks pop up in the last few years — companies like N26, Atom and Monzo that are taking on the big incumbents by creating faster and cheaper services for a new class of consumers as they grow up and enter the working world. Now a startup has raised a sizeable Series A to tackle what it believes is a similar opportunity in the small business… Read More
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From rising rents to online competitors, local stores and restaurants face enough challenges outside of their own doors that basic stuff like scheduling employees’ shifts and breaks should feel easy. But that process is still, too often, a mess of paperwork and data entry. A startup called Homebase has raised $6 million to make hourly work much easier to manage for every business on… Read More
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FiveStars, a five year-old startup that has built a platform and app to run loyalty programs and shopping analytics for small brick-and-mortar retailers, has received a reward of its own: the company has raised a round of $50 million, funding that it plans to use to continue its focus on “mom and pop shops” and building its brand and business across the U.S., CEO and… Read More
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Microsoft is rolling out new Office 365 plans for companies with fewer than 250 employees that will slowly replace the company’s existing plans for small and midsize businesses. The company had already outlined some of these changes earlier this year, so this week’s announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise.
Here is what these new plans look like:
Office 365… Read More
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Cloud-based payroll startup ZenPayroll wants to improve the way payroll is handled by small and medium-sized businesses, and to provide them with tools they need to do so. With the introduction of an API, the company is opening up integration with a wide variety of other back-office tools already used by many of its customers. Read More
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As GoDaddy gears up for a $100 million IPO, the domain and web services company is adding on more features that will help it make more profitable revenues from its 12 million small-business customers. The latest of these puts GoDaddy further into the world of e-commerce. Today, it is launching “Get Paid,” a new online and mobile payments service created with existing… Read More
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