Amsterdam’s Dutch Founders Fund invests €4.1M in London fintech kennek #

Dutch Founders Fund, ffVC, and Plug and Play Ventures led a $4.5 million (approximately €4.1 million) pre-seed round of funding for London-based fintech business kennek, it was announced on Thursday.

The British company says it will use the money to expand faster.

The founders of startups such as WeTransfer, Just Eat, Treatwell, and fonQ have created the Dutch Founders Fund (DFF) in Amsterdam.

It is a venture capital firm that supports entrepreneurs across Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and invests in firms that rely on network effects, such as B2B marketplaces. Since it started in 2018, the company has put money into 24 other businesses and is now responsible for about €100 million.

Thibaut Lankesweert, Xavier De Pauw, and Edmund Parsons started kennek in 2021 to solve operational scalability problems for lenders and investors and make it easier to finance loans.

The alternative lending sector is still largely based on manual operations and data stored in spreadsheets, the company’s founders say. kennek has built a full-featured platform to make it easier for the alternative credit industry to lend, invest, do business, and provide services.

To this end, according to Xavier De Pauw, the company will help channel money from institutional investors to the real economy, such as small and medium-sized enterprises, developers, and corporations.

This UK-based company has made a plug-and-play operating system that can be used by many different lenders and loan options.

It also has commercial successes with clients in small and medium-sized business (SMB) lending, research and development (R&D), and commercial real estate (CRE). The company also says that corporations use its platform to manage receivables financing and provide embedded loans.