Today we are pleased to announce our £26 million Series B fundraise led by Barclays, Santander InnoVentures and current shareholders Northzone; along with Viola Credit who will also provide our platform with a funding line of £30 million to help finance small businesses.

This is a great milestone for our company and testament to a great deal of hard work from the whole Kriya team. Since our launch in 2011, we’ve been working with entrepreneurs across the country to understand their industries and the opportunities for growth. We’ve built our lending solutions around their needs and earned their trust. Now, having financed over £2 billion through our platform, we’re excited to scale to the next level.

The objectives of this round are simple: we want to continue building out our products and delighting our customers with the whole experience — from application through funds in their account. We’ll execute on key strategic partnerships that will help build awareness about our solutions to many more businesses, as well as unlock richer data sources for us to improve our risk model and pricing. The debt facility from Viola is also a first step in unlocking larger sources of capital to allow us to finance more companies on the platform.

I’ve always wanted Kriya to be an interconnected platform that can work with many strategic partners, whether that’s integrating into a business’ e-accountancy software or partnering with the British Business Bank to deploy cash directly on the platform. We’re now starting to collaborate more deeply with high street banks to embed our lending solutions into their core business banking offering, both here in the UK, and in the future new geographies aboard.

Our smart technology enables us to automate the laborious work flow that comes with setting up finance facilities for small businesses. By integrating our products, banks can get money to their SME clients faster than by trying to build everything themselves. Over the past 7 years we’ve completed thousands of transactions and compiled ever more data sources to become increasingly confident that our risk model and lending engine are robust and scalable.

But technology alone doesn’t win in this Kriya. We’ve learned that entrepreneurs want a human relationship when it comes to choosing a financial partner. Our offering must leverage the best that tech and people can bring to solve what is probably the hardest scaling issues entrepreneurs face: cash flow.

Now more than ever, entrepreneurs must have access to cash flow as they navigate choppy political and economic conditions. We hope today they see how committed Kriya is to making it quicker and easier to access the finance they need to scale up and flourish.