Banxware raises €15m in Series A round led by UniCredit

By Gloria Methri

Berlin-based embedded lending provider Banxware has raised €15 million in its latest equity round and gained major Italian bank Unicredit as an investor. Unicredit was joined by Sella Investment Banking, along with existing shareholders 13books Capital, VR Ventures, D4 Ventures and Force Over Mass, who also contributed to the funding.

Banxware currently enables 30 platforms in Germany and the Netherlands to offer financing to their business customers, closing a gap in the underserved long-tail SME market. Its customers include platforms like Worldline (Payone), JustEat Takeaway (Lieferando), Qonto, SumUp, Agicap, and others. Banxware enables customers to obtain financing quickly and easily, right where they manage their business activities.

UniCredit is supporting direct investments in companies that can accelerate its transformation journey. The Group is focusing on players with state-of-the-art technology, which provide digital capabilities and deploy new business models to better serve clients and attract new ones, improve internal practices, and accelerate the achievement of targets.

Fiona Melrose, Head of Group Strategy & ESG at UniCredit, said, “This investment underlines our ambition to further enhance the Group’s technological and digital drive to benefit our customers. With Banxware’s financing solutions, we can broaden our lending proposition and complement our existing offering for SME clients, gaining access to a new customer base. Partnerships of this kind, which could be extended to other geographies, always offer opportunities to exchange ideas, learn from each other and jointly develop new areas of business.”

Expressing her excitement, Jens Roehrborn, CEO of Banxware, said, “We are now working with one of Europe’s largest banks, UniCredit, to bridge the SME funding gap. For us, embedded lending, i.e. enabling platforms to offer loans to their business customers, goes far beyond the platforms where these customers generate revenue. Over the past 3 years, we have built a very scalable solution where we can reach SMEs through any kind of platform they use to conduct their businesses. It only made sense that Banxware enables banks to offer different loan products and loan amounts to their existing customers.”