iwoca Ltd. is an online FinTech company based in London. It offers credit facilities to small businesses trading in the UK, Poland and Germany via an automated lending platform. CEO Christoph Rieche and CTO James Dear founded iwoca in October 2011 and the company started trading in March 2012. iwoca initially offered credit exclusively to e-commerce businesses. However, in April 2014 it expanded its criteria and started to lend to all types of small businesses.
Iwoca provides loans of up to £150,000 and uses various machine learning models to automatically assess businesses based on data taken directly from eBay, Amazon, PayPal, Sage Pay, business bank accounts and other online and offline platforms. This follows a similar model to that used by Kabbage in the United States. A 3% monthly interest rate and maximum loan term of 12 months are typical.
In December 2014, iwoca announced that it had lent almost £30 million across 5,000 transactions in the UK and Poland. In July 2015 it was reported to have seen 250% year-on-year growth in issuance.
Video Iwoca
Investors
iwoca is funded by private investors and venture capitalists. In January 2014 it announced that it had raised £5 million in investment from Global Founders Capital and Redline Capital Management, to be used for UK and European expansion. In July 2015 it announced that it had raised $20 million equity from investors including CommerzVentures and Acton Capital in its Series B round.
Maps Iwoca
Awards
In 2012 iwoca won a Smarta 100 award as one of the most disruptive small businesses in the UK. Since then they have been selected by UK Startup Awards as a Top Twenty UK Startup and won the Wired Money Startup Pitch. In May 2015 iwoca was selected as the Alternative Lender of the Year for Commercial Credit in the Credit Today awards.
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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