Barclays and Santander InnoVentures have raised £26 million for British fintech startup MarketInvoice, in the sector’s first significant funding round of 2019.
The Series B funding round comes after Barclays earlier took a minority interest in the invoice trading fintech and announced a strategic partnership in August 2018.
The bank has since rolled out the lending service to its large SME client base.
Invoice trading allows businesses to rapidly raise working capital against their invoices. Companies like MarketInvoice act as a middleman in exchange for a service fee. Applicants to MarketInvoice, which has a range of short-term financing solutions, including several invoice trading options, have to have a minimum turnover of £500,000 and be using one of its supported accountancy software packages (e,g, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage 50 or 200, Microsoft Dynamics’ Navision, etc.)
Barclays: “Demonstrates our Committment to MarketInvoice”
Ian Rand, CEO of Barclays Business Bank, said: “Collaborating with fintech companies like MarketInvoice is an integral part of Barclays’ strategy for accelerating growth. This investment demonstrates our commitment to the partnership we announced last summer which offers hundreds of thousands of our SME clients access to even more innovative forms of finance, boosting cash flow and competition in the market.”
Technology credit fund Viola Credit, which also participated in the equity round, will provide a further debt facility of up to £30 million to help scale the MarketInvoice business loans offering, that sits alongside its core invoice finance solutions line.
Anil Stocker, co-founder & CEO of MarketInvoice, commented: “This investment is perfectly timed for the company… By collaborating with bank partners, we will be reaching many thousands of companies here in the UK and abroad to provide them with their business finance needs. We aim to invest in technology, data and strategic partnerships, to take MarketInvoice to the next level.”
Since 2011, MarketInvoice has funded invoices and business loans to UK companies worth more than £2 billion, making it Europe’s largest online invoice finance platform.
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