Kabbage secures $250m funding
Kabbage, a company with some 115,000 customers and $3.5 billion in loans that has built an automated platform for lending money to small businesses and individuals using data points to determine a customer’s credit score, has announced SoftBank Group is investing $250 million in the company. The money will be used to expand into the US; launch yet more analytics tools to provide loans for specific verticals; expand into new markets like Asia; and to explore acquisitions to add new products to its business, like payments. The investment, a Series F, brings the total raised by Kabbage in equity funding to $500 million.
Founded in Atlanta in 2009, Kabbage was an early mover in the concept of using big data analytics to underwrite and monitor loans: the company draws on hundreds of sources of information, from a company’s or individual’s public social media profiles and a business’s QuickBooks accounts, through to larger macro data sets, to decide whether or not to loan money (and how much to loan).
