Fundera SMB Online Credit Marketplace Gets Funded

Online credit marketplace Fundera, which focuses on small business loans, said on Thursday (Sept. 17) that it has raised $11.5 million in Series B funding.

The latest round, which takes the total amount raised by the company to $15 million, was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity and saw participation from other, existing investors that included QED Investors, First Round Capital and Khosla Ventures, TechCrunch reported.

In addition to the capital raised, two new members are joining Fundera’s board: Susquehanna’s Scott Feldman and QED’s Frank Rotman.

In an interview with PYMNTS this past summer, CEO and Cofounder Jared Hecht said that the company seeks to combat the typically scarce funding landscape for SMBs, having established an online credit marketplace that caters to small businesses looking for loans. The funds raised in the latest round, according to Fundera, will go toward staff expansion, particularly in the areas of engineering and loan specialization.

Since its founding last year, the site has helped secure more than $60 million in credit for more than 1,200 businesses across the United States across a variety of industries.

As TechCrunch noted, Fundera’s business model differs from traditional lenders in that the latter players typically charge between 5 percent and 15 percent for loans. But Fundera takes only a 1 to 3 percent cut — as an origination fee — from the lenders.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Hecht stated that “we work a growing network of 25+ different lenders, and a small business owner can secure a loan from almost every single one of them without ever leaving the Fundera website. That’s an incredibly difficult challenge to tackle on both the product and engineering front. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that a customer has a seamless experience and never has to think or worry about the individual integrations with the funding providers we work with.”

[bctt tweet=”There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to ensure that a customer has a seamless experience.”]

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