London-based fintech firm kennek announced on Thursday that it has raised $4.5M (approximately €4.1M) in a pre-Seed round of funding led by Dutch Founders Fund, ffVC, and Plug and Play Ventures.
The UK firm says it will use the funds to scale and accelerate its growth.
Dutch Founders Fund: All you need to know
Amsterdam-based Dutch Founders Fund (DFF) is an early-stage venture capital fund started by the people behind WeTransfer, Just Eat, Treatwell, and fonQ.
The VC invests in B2B marketplaces and other businesses that are built upon network effects, backing founders all over Europe and the MENA region.
Since its launch in 2018, the fund has successfully invested in 24 companies and has around €100M in Asset under Management (AuM).
Laurens Groenendijk of the Dutch Founders Fund says, “De Pauw, Lancksweert, and Parsons bring the such varied and necessary experience together to address the inefficiencies of lending,”
“The uniquely designed product and lending rails that kennek is creating will make it much easier for lenders worldwide to launch, operate and scale,” he adds.
kennek: Empowering alternate credit sector
Thibault Lancksweert, Xavier De Pauw, and Edmund Parsons founded kennek in 2021 to solve two major pain points – operational scalability for lenders and investors, and more efficient funding of credits.
According to the founders, “the alternative lending industry is still largely run on manual workflows and with data living in spreadsheets.”
Due to these outdated processes, lenders are not cost-efficient and struggle to access funding from institutional investors, who require reliable and connected data, and robust and scalable processes.
As a result, kennek has developed an end-to-end operating system to streamline the operations for lenders, credit investors, corporates, and services in the alternative credit sector.
De Pauw says, “Our goal is to create a single point of truth for all stakeholders in the lending value chain.”
He adds, “This will help drive capital from institutional investors to the real economy, such as SMEs, property developers, and corporates.”
kennek’s platform helps lenders manage everything from loan origination and servicing to portfolio management and investor reporting.
The UK company has already launched a plug-and-play operating system that caters to a broad variety of lenders and credit products.
It has also secured commercial wins with clients operating in the areas of SME loans, R&D credit, and Commercial Real Estate.
The company also claims that corporates use its platform to offer embedded credit and to manage their receivables financing.
