P2P lender RateSetter announced on Thursday its community of investors have lent more than £400 million to small and medium-sized businesses throughout the UK. The online lender revealed on Twitter the exciting milestone news.
RateSetter investors have lent more than £400m to businesses across the UK, including @makepositive. Read more here: https://t.co/5Kxu5YREXp pic.twitter.com/YkGC3uz9wW
— RateSetter (@RateSetter) April 20, 2017
As part of the milestone, RateSetter took a look back at makepositive, a company that specializes in helping firms to make better use of cloud-based platform Salesforce, which used a RateSetter loan to fund its expansion.
“Salesforce has over 150,000 business customers and has made over 100 acquisitions since it launched in 1999, and makepositive has become the leading domestic implementation partner in the UK. In simple terms, that means that makepositive helps UK companies to get the most value out of Salesforce’s products – not only implementing them but also designing custom solutions to work around them and integrating them with other tools and programmes, and they’ve won a good deal of recognition from Salesforce itself: last year makepositive was the only European company to win a Salesforce Global Innovation Award. All this has translated into steady expansion and multi-million pound projects.”
RateSetter also reported that makepositive has already expanded its workforce from 80 to 125 thanks to the £1 million raised, £800,000 was used to form equity shares, and the remaining £200,000 was provided as a RateSetter Loan. Director at makepositive, Matt Cooksley, stated:
“The RateSetter loan was great because it didn’t involve any further dilution of our equity. We also liked it because it is very flexible in allowing us to pay off the loan early without penalty, should we wish to do so.”
Cooksley went on to add:
“With our investment in R&D, we are hoping to build out our Intellectual Property to provide cost-effective and innovative solutions for our customers”, added Matt. “We will be re-investing constantly in that whole process to continue to expand our position in the market. We have plans to raise our staff headcount from 125 to 200 in the near future. The whole process was smooth and efficient, but what was really special was the way RateSetter took the trouble to understand our business and its needs – something, I think, that came out of their due-diligence procedures. The resulting facility didn’t feel like a loan from, say, a bank, but more like an investment from a supportive partner.”