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Atlanta based SME lender Kabbage has raised $250m in Series F funding led by SoftBank. 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).
At a time when a number of other online small business lenders like OnDeck and Can Capital have stumbled under iffy business models, amid a wider shakedown in the online loan industry overall, Kabbage has grown. Frohwein attributes this squarely to its big data play, which collectively now crunches some 1.5 million data connections to help make decisions. “When the proverbial shit hit the fan in the online lending space a little while back, people at Kabbage were nervous. All I said was, ‘finally!'” Frohwein recalled. “What’s happened is that now we have some separation between companies that were not focused on building differentiated solutions and those that are trying to do something different. We’ve gotten past the point of puffery. A small handful of companies have differentiated themselves and I think Kabbage is one of those.”
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/small-business-loan-platform-kabbage-nabs-250m-from-softbank/
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