Small business lender BlueVine just nabbed $102.5 million in funding on the heels of its banking launch
- Small business lender BlueVine just raised $102.5 million in equity funding led by ION Crossover Partners, with participation from Citi Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank Capital, and Menlo Ventures.
- The Series F comes a month after BlueVine announced its new banking service for businesses.
- This round brings BlueVine's total capital raised to $240 million.
- "The fundraise is holistically to enable this company to get to a scale where it could be a large, publicly traded fintech company," Tyler Sosin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told Business Insider.
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Small business lender BlueVine just raised $102.5 million in equity funding, and the Series F comes just a month after the company announced its new banking service.
This brings BlueVine's total capital raised to $240 million. Founded in 2013, BlueVine offers small businesses multiple credit options, including revolving lines of credit and invoice factoring, in addition to its new banking services.
The latest funding round was led by ION Crossover Partners with participation from investors including Citi Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank Capital, and Menlo Ventures.
"The fundraise is holistically to enable this company to get to a scale where it could be a large, publicly traded fintech company," Tyler Sosin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told Business Insider. Menlo also has investments in fintechs like robo-advisor Betterment and neobank Chime.
"A lot of the capital will go towards the existing credit operations, and as we launch the banking product, it will go toward continuing to build features and make that product more complete and unique in the marketplace," Sosin said.
BlueVine will continue to develop the credit side of its business alongside its new bank, said Sosin.
"Credit products interwoven with banking products are very powerful," Sosin said. "You have more lock-in with the customer."
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a BlueVine investor, has been providing small business banking for 35 years, and 50% of all venture capital-backed tech and life science companies in the US bank with them, according to its website.
When BlueVine Business Banking launched in October, BlueVine CEO Eyal Lifshitz told Business Insider that given SVB's focus on the startup segment, he saw it as supportive of BlueVine's banking, which will target the broader small business space.
"There isn't an equivalent of Silicon Valley Bank for small businesses, not for tech companies or startups, but for small businesses," he said then.
BlueVine works with The Bancorp Bank to provide bank account services. BlueVine's lines of credit and term loans are issued by Utah-chartered Celtic Bank.
In the banking space, BlueVine competes with the likes of Novo and Rho, which are digital banks also targeting startups and small businesses.
Other small business lenders have been looking to expand their product offerings. Kabbage recently launched a payments platform to help its customers manage loans and incoming cash. Fundbox now offers its customers advances on pending receivables, giving small businesses access to cash before net-terms settlement.