UK’s Blend Network has reportedly acquired a £120 million funding line from a group of family offices, which the firm said it would use to scale its existing loan book.
Yann Murciano, CEO at Blend Network, a specialist development finance lender, explained that obtaining the considerable funding line confirms the steady progress the firm has been making and how appealing it has become for institutional investors.
Murciano also mentioned that the new funding line will allow them to boost their origination capability considerably. And it should also help with widening the range of services that they provide property brokers to assist them in sourcing various lending opportunities, Murciano added.
He added that the funding line allows them to provide improved support to assist mid-sized residential property developers across the United Kingdom with increasing their lending capacity, which should make a greater contribution to addressing the nation’s housing crisis.
This latest funding line has been announced after Blend Network acquired £10 million in an oversubscribed round in February 2022.
The Blend Network platform managed to attract investment via an institutional fundraise that had been led by VC investor Nico Paraskevas, a former senior management professional at Glencore.
International law firm Ashurst has reportedly advised Blend Network on this particular transaction and also the recent equity funding round.
Jonathan Cohen, partner at Ashurst, noted that they really enjoyed supporting the Blend Network team with scaling operations and acquiring funds to allocate them in the position where they have secured this committed capital, and they are now looking forward to working cooperatively with them during the next phase of Blend’s growth.
In a separate update, the Blend Network team noted that “over the past few years, [they] have excitedly seen a new generation of property developers emerge: younger, digitally-savvy and socially engaged, these unlikely developers are taking the real estate development market by storm.”
As noted by Blend, these developers – “often in their thirties and forties – are a different breed of developers, frequently driven by a different set of incentives and with a more holistic skillset than their precursors.”
The firm then asks how “can we lenders support this new generation of property developers?”
They also ask “How can we work with them to tackle the housing crisis and solve one of the most critical challenges of our time?”
Murciano recently assessed the “real challenges” and has “proposed concrete solutions to how lenders like [them] can support the next generation of developers.”
For more details on this update, check here.
