Waddle Lands $38 Million In Debt Funding

Australia-based alternative small business (SMB) lender Waddle has reportedly received new debt financing.

According to news in The Australian on Tuesday (Nov. 28), Waddle secured about $38 million in debt funding from an investment management firm, though the firm’s three founders declined to name the investor. Waddle announced the funding while revealing figures about its growth, telling reporters the company has seen nearly 100 percent year-over-year growth in lending volume, which has now surpassed about $22.8 million.

In an interview with the publication, Co-Founder Simon Creighton described the debt financing as “a stepping stone for Waddle.”

“Our current funder has the capacity to take us to where we need to be in the next three to five years, allowing us to scale funding without having to keep looking for new debt facilities as we grow,” he said. “This will enable the team to really focus on Waddle’s next stage of growth, which includes building out further automation in credit, operations and user experience, building mobile applications, expediting current enterprise partner solutions and scaling up the development team for our wider global offering.”

Last year, Waddle announced a partnership with Xero, the region’s largest small business cloud accounting firm. Their joint venture saw Waddle providing an invoice financing service to SMBs on the Xero platform. Last June, Waddle provided an update on the progress of that Xero integration, estimating that the integration has saved small business owners an average of 12 hours a week by automating cash flow data analytics.

Australia’s alternative lending market is one of the world’s strongest. Recent analysis from KPMG, released in September, found that Australia was the Asia-Pacific region’s second-largest alternative finance market, behind China. Separate reports in the International Business Times found that Australia’s alternative finance market grew 53 percent in the last year.