London-based FinTech startup kennek snaps $4.5 million in a pre-seed funding round

Dutch Founders Fund, ffVC, and Plug and Play Ventures led a pre-Seed round of fundraising totaling $4.5M for the London-based fintech startup kennek, which has raised this money.

According to the UK company, it would utilize the money to scale and hasten its expansion.

The creators of WeTransfer, Just Eat, Treatwell, and fonQ founded the early-stage venture capital firm known as Dutch Founders Fund (DFF), which has its headquarters in Amsterdam.

The VC supports founders across Europe and the MENA region by investing in B2B marketplaces and other companies that rely on network effects.

The fund has successfully invested in 24 businesses since its 2018 debut, and it currently manages about €100 million in assets (AuM).

“De Pauw, Lancksweert, and Parsons bring such varied and important skills together to address the inefficiencies of lending,” says Laurens Groenendijk of the Dutch Founders Fund

He continues, “Kennek’s specially crafted product and lending rails will significantly ease the launch, operation, and scaling for lenders worldwide.

Kennek was established in 2021 by Thibault Lancksweert, Xavier De Pauw, and Edmund Parsons to address two pressing issues: operational scalability for lenders and investors, and more effective funding of credits.

The alternative lending sector “is still primarily run on manual operations and with data living in spreadsheets,” the creators claim.

Lenders are not cost-effective as a result of these antiquated methods, and they have difficulty obtaining funding from institutional investors who need trustworthy and connected data as well as robust and scalable systems.

To simplify operations for lenders, credit investors, corporations, and services in the alternative credit sector, Kennek has created an end-to-end operating system.

We want to establish a single source of truth for all parties involved in the lending value chain, according to De Pauw.

This will assist channel cash from institutional investors toward the actual economy, including SMEs, real estate investors, and corporations, he continues.

The kennek platform assists lenders in managing everything from portfolio management and investor reporting to loan origination and servicing.

A plug-and-play operating system that supports a wide range of lenders and credit products has already been released by the UK startup.

The startup has won business from clients who work in the fields of SME loans, R&D financing, and commercial real estate.

Additionally, the company asserts that corporates utilize its platform to manage their receivables finance and to give integrated credit.

Image Credit: kennek