BlueVine, a cloud-based short term funding platform for small businesses, has closed a $49m Series D round. The round was led by existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, 83North, Citi Ventures, Rakuten FinTech Fund and Silicon Valley Bank. Menlo Ventures led BlueVine’s last fundraise – a $40m Series C round in January of this year.
BlueVine is an online lending platform which specialises in invoice factoring and lines of credit. In addition to announcing its fundraise, BlueVine has also upped the maximum credit limit on invoice factoring from $250k to $2m, with the maximum limit for its lines of credit climbing from $50k to $100k.
“BlueVine is delivering unprecedented ease and convenience to meet SMB owners’ financing needs and help them achieve their goals,” said Eyal Lifshitz (pictured above), CEO and founder of BlueVine.
BlueVine has now provided over $200m in working capital for small businesses, and says that it is on track to fund more than $500m in 2017.
Like any cash flow focused online lender worth its salt, BlueVine has a number of key partnerships in place with major cloud accounting firms. Chief among these is its integration with Intuit’s QuickBooks. Rania Succar, business leader of QuickBooks financing, said that BlueVine’s business line of credit has proven “very popular” with users.
“It fills a critical part of the QuickBooks Financing portfolio and allows us to extend credit to younger businesses,” he said.
MarketInvoice, the UK equivalent of BlueVine, has similar arrangements in place with accountancy giant Sage, as well as with Xero. In addition to driving origination flows, these integrations allow for greater automation to be brought to bear upon the underwriting process – speeding up the pace of lending.
After a difficult stretch for the online lending industry in 2016, venture capital now appears to be flowing again. ApplePie Capital, a specialist online lender for the franchise industry, closed a $16.5m Series B earlier this week.
Commenting on BlueVine’s successful Series D round, Yoni Cheifetz of Lightspeed Venture Partners said: “This team continues to push the pace of innovation to deliver best-in-class everyday financing products.”
