Just a few months after a Eurobond issuance of $30 million, SimpleFinance, a Russian online micro-lending platform targeting small and medium-sized businesses, has secured an equity investment from the SBI FinTech Business Innovation Fund LPS. Neither the amount nor any details of the deal were disclosed.
The fund, with a capital amounting to JPY 30 billion ($271 million), was launched in June 2016 to invest in promising fintech companies. It is affiliated to SBI Investment, one of Japan’s leading venture capital firms which invests in fintech, IT, biotechnology and life science.
Launched in 2015, SimpleFinance offers several financing tools including factoring, asset-backed loans, unsecured loans (up to 3 million rubles, approximately $50,000), and tender loans.
SimpleFinance’s platform supports fully electronic document processing and online-only customer interactions. In addition, the company has built its own P2P-platform, called SimplyFi, for small and medium-sized businesses to raise funds directly from private investors.
The company competes with a number of banks or micro-finance organizations, but claims that none of these competitors has an identical product mix.
