Specialist property peer-to-peer lender CrowdProperty has closed a £1.1m equity funding round. The campaign, hosted on Seedrs, smashed the £600,000 target, over-funding by 81% with £1,089,000 raised from 575 investors based on a pre-money valuation of £15.7m.

There’s one thing we continue to hear from our SME customers right now and it might surprise you that it’s not ‘Brexit’. In fact, it’s ‘the future’. Despite the doom and gloom of Brexit causing concern for 90 percent of SMEs, the reality is that 2019 still holds a lot of opportunity for growth. As a result, many businesses are taking control and tackling these challenging times head on.

Quilam Capital, which provides both debt and equity solutions to companies in the speciality finance sector, has announced its seventh investment since it launched late 2017. 

Quilam has made a multi-million-pound investment into Propensio Finance Limited, a technology-led niche consumer finance platform, which provides unsecured loans to home owners to fund home improvements. The business has a strong network and relationships with home improvement product providers throughout the UK.

Marketplace lending hit a record £6.1bn in 2018, according to Link Asset Services’ inaugural Marketplace Lending Index, powered by Brismo (formerly named AltFi Data).

The value of gross marketplace lending conducted by tech-enabled platforms (which includes crowdfunded or peer-to-peer loans) reached a quarterly record of £1.6bn in Q4, up 13.9% year on year.

The record end to 2018 marks an impressive rise for this form of lending.  In 2011, new gross lending amounted to just £92m. It now takes a shade under six days for marketplace platforms to originate this amount. 

Leading estate agency comparison business GetAgent has closed a £2.2m super-seed round from a consortium of investors led by Marchmont Ventures, backers of Motorway.co.uk and joins the Channel 4 Commercial Growth Fund, the investment arm of Channel 4 Television which invested in 2018.  GetAgent is the estate agency comparison website, comparing the performance of every UK estate agency via multiple, third party data points to reliably help potential home sellers choose the right agent based upon performance.

Specialist property peer-to-peer lender CrowdProperty has secured the backing of a major financial institution to lend up to £100 million of loan capital to CrowdProperty’s expertly curated property projects over the coming 12-24 months.

London-based VC fund Fuel Ventures has expanded its portfolio of early-stage companies, investing £2 million in CreditDigital which provides instant finance of up to £250,000 to businesses online or at point of sale.  CreditDigital is an instalment payment option where businesses can spread the cost of their purchase over 12 months, whilst their vendors and suppliers get paid upfront and in full.  The platform can approve purchases of up to £15,000 instantly and up to £250,000 within one working day with competitive rates and flexible payment options.

Beechbrook Capital, the specialist direct lender, has reached the first close of its second UK SME Credit Fund, with commitments of £128m. The Fund has also made its first two investments, in Hosted Desktop UK and Gravity Global.

Beechbrook’s UK SME Credit II supports small and medium-sized businesses in the UK with a turnover of between £10m and £100m and EBITDA of £1m and above. It will provide mainly senior secured loans to non private equity-backed companies to support acquisitions, buy-outs, shareholder re-alignments, refinancings and general expansion plans.

P2PFA platforms facilitated loans worth nearly £3 billion during 2018, with more than 288,000 current borrowers during the fourth quarter, as further evidence of the maturity of the UK peer-to-peer lending market is revealed.

The quarterly data reveal that during the final quarter of 2018 more than £800 million of new lending was facilitated by P2PFA platforms, comprising £527 million to businesses and £282 million to almost a quarter-of-a-million consumers. Cumulative lending among P2PFA platforms has now exceeded £5.5 billion for business lending and £4 billion for consumer lending.

Godwin Capital, the fundraising and investment arm of Godwin Group, has recruited senior debt funding consultant Stan Lersch.

Investment manager Downing LLP has completed the acquisition of Funding Empire, a peer-to-peer (P2P) lender and the company behind Downing Crowd’s platform technology.

Specialist property peer-to-peer lender CrowdProperty has launched CrowdProperty AutoInvest, the newest and easiest way to invest on the CrowdProperty platform.

CrowdProperty AutoInvest is a stress-free way to invest money across every high-quality, first charge secured project launched, built to save investors time and effort in building a diversified investment portfolio without platform or financial advisor fees. AutoInvest is available to lenders in both their Standard and ISA accounts.