The Flender founding team, from left: Finance director Jeremy Davies, CEO Kristjan Koik and sales director Oli Cavanagh. Image: Flender
They liked it so much they invested in the product.
Dublin fintech Flender is hurtling with fierce velocity towards a funding round worth more than €2m, with involvement from some of its customers, who have already pledged €400,000.
Flender is a peer-to-peer lending start-up founded last year by technology entrepreneurs Kristjan Koik (CEO), Oli Cavanagh and Jeremy Davies. The platform has also attracted Ding founder Mark Roden to its board.
‘Initially, we offered €100,000 to them but this quickly overfunded and we increased this to €400,000’
– KRISTJAN KOIK
The company, a previous Siliconrepublic.com Start-up of the Week, has so far lent €1m to businesses.
Crowd wisdom
According to Koik, Flender is in talks to close the €2m-plus round. A substantial share of this has already come from the start-up’s own community of lenders via the Flender platform.
“We invited our crowd – retail lenders that lend to borrowers on [the] Flender marketplace – to participate in our equity round,” Koik told Siliconrepublic.com.
“Initially, we offered €100,000 to them but this quickly overfunded and we increased this to €400,000.
“Currently, there is around £1.1m available from this £2m raise and we are in talks with several investors for this part of funding.”
Last year, around €350,000 of angel funding was also raised from investors including Roden, Philip Grant and Rupert Horner to fund initial research and development of the unique finance platform.
Earlier this year, Flender raised £500,000 on UK crowdfunding platform Seedrs.
The founding team has been involved in other successful tech start-ups, most recently DocLink, which helps doctors and their teams collaborate digitally and securely; and Instacoach, a video analysis platform used by tennis, golf, cricket and swimming coaches around the world.
