Check out the pitch deck that helped Kennek, a London fintech startup that helps digitize private credit providers, raise $12.5 million in seed funding

• Kennek, a London fintech startup that helps digitize private credit providers, has raised $12.5 million.
• Founded in 2021, the company offers a SaaS platform to the non-bank lending space.
• The company wants to double down on its UK presence with its new funding round.

Kennek, a London-based fintech startup that helps private credit businesses digitize their offerings, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding.

Kennek was founded in 2021 by a group of former banking and credit industry operators to provide better digital tooling to the non-bank lending industry.

Banks are lending less than they used to, which has resulted in the emergence of many smaller, alternative credit providers to provide alternatives. According to Kennek CEO Xavier De Pauw, these newer businesses are good at lending but not so good at technology.

“While there has been a lot of innovation in fintech, there hasn’t been as much in the credit and lending space.” “There is no banking system for lenders,” he told Insider, despite some changes on the decision-making side in terms of data and technology for the wider value chain. “This is a sector that is still set in its ways so we have built a system to help smaller lenders become more efficient.”

Kennek’s software-as-a-service, or SaaS, solution provides an all-in-one platform that connects from credit decisioning to monitoring, reporting, underwriting, and other data to assist lenders in meeting various due diligence checks on prospective borrowers and investors.

HV Capital led the company’s seed funding, which was backed by Dutch Founders Fund, AlbionVC, FFVC, Plug & Play Ventures, and Syndicate One.

“We decided to raise before the summer because we had clear momentum so we went to the market like a military operation,” De Pauw told reporters. “We did everything right then had to be lucky and, in the end, the round was very efficient and took less than three weeks.”

The new funds will be used to expand Kennek’s core offering in London, where it plans to double its 20-person team and invest more in technology and product.