With offices in Madrid and Barcelona, LoanBook successfully completes its fourth investment round on Crowdcube, raising €830,000.
James Buckland
Headed by CEO James Buckland, LoanBook is Spain’s leading marketplace lending platform that specializes in loans for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
The startup offers working capital loans of up to €200,000 euros to Spanish SMEs, and has successfully completed its fourth investment round on Crowdcube, reaching € 830,000 with some 288 investors.
With near a 40% market share, LoanBook has lent nearly €40M to date and has doubled its volumes in each of the last three years.
According to Crowdcube, “The SME finance market in Spain is large, with over €10bn/month lent to Spanish SMEs. Well over 90% of this lending comes from Spanish banks, which have not yet recovered from the global financial crisis and are suffering from a failure to modernise in the years prior to the crisis. They are weighed down by unwieldy infrastructure, legacy systems, regulatory change and an outdated culture; and are more focused on repairing their balance sheets and restoring profitability, than on providing a high-quality service to their customers.”
Founded in late 2013, LoanBook began offering a service that very few companies provided in Spain at the time. The Spanish startup has obtained capital of 4.7 million euros in its first three years of activity, and it staged the biggest round in a crowdlending platform in Spain, closing its third round of financing for 1.75 million euros, according to El Referente.
The latest funded exceeded the initial objective by 11%, which aimed to secure £650,000 of financing (about € 733,000). Thanks to this latest investment, which has involved various business angels, family offices, and shareholders, LoanBook has attracted resources to continue expanding.
LoanBook was one of six companies that joined together in 2015 to improve and promote the fintech industry in Spain. Kantox, LoanBook, Comunitae, Arboribus, Finanzarel y Deudae had joined forces to try to pressure local legislators and to achieve better terms for their startups and those that might be founded in the future.
Read More: Knocking on Banco de España’s doors: the Spanish Association of Fintech
The main objective of the Spanish Association of Financial Technology (SAFT) was set to lobby the government and other public institutions to get more favorable conditions for fintech startups in a market that was dominated by traditional banks and companies that have been in business for decades.