Liberis secures an additional £140m from Barclays Bank PLC and BCI Finance to fund SMEs
Sep 2022
Liberis, a leading global embedded business finance platform, has announced that they have secured £140m in financing from Barclays Bank PLC and BCI Finance to help secure its global partner expansion and growth plans for the next two years. This brings Liberis’ total funds raised to £350m, including over £80m in equity funding. In December 2021 Barclays led a £34m funding round for Liberis.
The new funds will be used to further scale Liberis’ platform, offering fair and increasingly flexible finance solutions to more small businesses through its global partners.
Liberis’ platform applies machine learning to understand a customer’s risk profile and maximum funding options available to them, enabling higher volumes of origination. This has allowed them to fund almost $1bn to over 21,000 SMEs across the UK, Europe, and the US, in over 50,000 transactions.
Rob Straathof, CEO of Liberis, commented: “This is a great opportunity for Liberis to continue helping SME growth across the globe, especially in such uncertain times that have been brought upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding will be crucial to supporting our partners in funding their SME customers to close the ever-expanding global funding gap.”
Sean White, MD of Securitised Products Solutions at Barclays, commented, “Barclays is excited to support Liberis with a new senior warehouse facility, which will allow the business to accelerate growth and continue to support smaller SME businesses with their funding needs.”
Sam Kemp, Managing Director at BCI Finance, commented, “We have been partnered with Liberis since 2015 and are delighted to again be evolving our support for the business as it scales. Alternative finance providers such as Liberis, focused on reducing the barriers to accessing working capital, play a vital role in providing SMEs with the funding that they need to operate and grow. This is particularly important during periods of economic uncertainty, and we’re excited to be continuing to work with the Liberis team as they further extend their global reach.”
Liberis’ global partner network consists of e-Commerce platforms such as Klarna and acquirers such as Barclaycard, Worldpay from FIS, Clover, and Global Payments. These partners integrate with Liberis to offer up to 1 million SMEs personalised revenue-based financing for up to £1m. Payments are linked to a company’s transactions, enabling them to pay for the funds more comfortably, in line with income.
Alongside support from Barclays and BCI Finance, Liberis is backed by investors including UK-based venture builder Blenheim Chalcot and US-based growth investor FTV Capital.