Many of you will already know iwoca (fronted by the ubiquitous Christoph Rieche).
They are well known in the UK SME ecommerce community for their hosting of a series of excellent ecommerce meet-ups over the past few years.
They seem to be going great guns and have attracted a further $20m investment this week. The series B round is reported here.
As they say on their blog: “Since our last funding round, iwoca has helped thousands of business owners across four countries and has grown to a team of 80 – but we’re not about to stop there. This new capital will allow us to dramatically improve our product and expand our reach to millions more businesses across Europe.
We’re extremely happy to welcome on board Acton, a specialist German venture capital firm, and CommerzVentures, the investment wing of Commerzbank. We’d also like to welcome back past investors who participated – thanks for believing in us the second time around! We now have some of the smartest investors in the fintech space on our side, and we truly appreciate the access to their experience and networks.”
So what will they do with the money? Are you a happy iwoca customer?
4 Responses
A reasonable way to borrow. However hidden in the small print (literally) , the big Stumbling block is you have to give a personal guarantee to borrow. Not all these types of lending companies do this. You have to be damm sure you can pay this back. For this reason I would not use them, especially if borrowing larger sums. If your business is good enough, a bank will give you up to £25k with no personal guarantees pretty easily and quickly.
We dont hear much about paypals working capital lending on this forum?
Its so easy quick and competitive we dont understand how its not Headline news on blogs like this
We dont agree banks lend easy thats why the above companies exists
I have used both IWOCA and Paypal working capital over the past 18 months. Both are easy and quick and do not require a full business plan that a bank would want. I agree with Tinker that banks are very difficult to borrow from and they are also not at all quick. I’ve yet to meet a bank that doesn’t want a personal guarantee.
I use Iwoca and Amazon. Amazon about half the price of Iwoca. Don’t use Paypal because tiny amount of sales through Paypal so the amount offered wasn’t worthwhile. Amazon is perfect for me as most of the business is through FBA so can get access to a decent sum.
I would never consider a bank. I did once and got bored reading the application form let alone completing it