In a venture round featuring Motley Fool Ventures and Ally Ventures – the strategic investment arm of Ally Financial – as well as individual angel investors, Streetshares has secured $10 million in new funding. The company said that it will use the capital, which takes the company’s total to more than $279 million, to drive future product development with an eye on serving small businesses in the post-PPP market.
“We’re seeing exciting digital adoption by banks and credit unions in response to COVID-19,” said StreetShares CEO Mark L. Rockefeller. “But equally important to us is the practical impact our technology is having in helping their customers, especially underserved business owners, get the funding they need to succeed.”
Founded in 2013 and launched a year later as an affordable digital lending alternative for veteran-owned small businesses, StreetShares unveiled its lending-as-a-service platform last year at our annual fintech conference FinovateFall. The platform enables banks to lend up to $250,000 to SMEs, and features a digital loan application, instant underwriting, loan servicing, and tracking. The company’s offering came in handy this year when the coronavirus struck and businesses across the country were shut down and starving for financial assistance. StreetShares’ technology was leveraged widely by community lenders in order to make Paycheck Protection Program funds available to SMEs.
As such, so far this year, a total of 53 financial institutions currently use the StreetShares platform. The company said that it is now expanding its platform into a suite of small business banking solutions that will be especially helpful for community banks, credit unions, and their small business clients as digital transformation initiatives continue in the wake of COVID-19.
“We’re seeing years of digital adoption by banks condensed into weeks,” said Ollen Douglass, Managing Director of Motley Fool Ventures. “Beginning with PPP, and now on to a full-suite of products, we believe StreetShares is positioned perfectly to power banks in their digital transformations.”
StreetShares is headquartered in Reston, Virginia. Read our profile of the company from last summer as StreetShares was stepping up to help bring needed financing to SMEs at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.