Softloans, a Vilnius-based fintech startup, has secured a €1 million pre-seed investment round led by venture capital fund Firstpick, with strategic contributions from business angels. The company provides an embedded revenue-based lending solution aimed at helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access working capital, particularly in the competitive e-commerce landscape. The funding will be used to further develop their technological solution, expanding its application beyond e-commerce businesses to include those using POS terminals. This will enable Softloans to offer their innovative lending product to a wider range of SMEs, ultimately fueling the growth of businesses in Lithuania and beyond.
Softloans’ embedded revenue-based lending solution offers a lifeline to SMEs grappling with the ever-intensifying competition in the e-commerce landscape. With global e-commerce giants dominating the market, smaller players often find themselves sidelined due to limited access to capital. Softloans bridges this gap by seamlessly integrating lending services into the digital platforms such as marketplaces, payment solutions providers, and aggregators to offer loans to their customers.
“The embedded financing tool we have developed works in such a way that the loan can be easily obtained by small and medium-sized businesses on other digital platforms that they use for their activities. The Softloans solution assesses the risks and creditworthiness of any e-shop extremely quickly and accurately. After the loan is issued, the solution constantly monitors the income flows and automatically deducts the agreed percentage for the repayment of the loan. The technological solution provides an opportunity to provide financing without collateral and without a fixed repayment schedule. Interest is replaced by a one-time loan fee,” says Audrius Griškevičius, CEO and co-founder of Softloans.
During the two years of operation of the startup, energy was devoted to the development and testing of a technological solution. The Softloans embedded revenue-based lending solution, which includes data collection, analytics, risk assessment, and loan management, is now already used by 10 partners. Using the powerful analytics solution, Softloans has already processed the data of almost 1,000 corporate clients in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Finland and Poland.
The pre-seed funding provides even more confidence and an opportunity to further develop the technological solution so that it is easily and smoothly applied not only to e-commerce businesses, but also to businesses using POS terminals. I have no doubt that the Softloans revenue-based financing solution is by far the best lending product for small and medium-sized businesses that we have on the market today. Like all innovations, this one has taken some time to be accepted by partners and customers in the region, but we are already seeing excellent results and are happy to be part of the growth of businesses. We are planning expansion in Lithuania and beyond,” says Audrius Griškevičius.
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