Done deal: Kabbage confirms Orchard acquisition

Matt Burton and David Snitkof will join Kabbage in leadership roles.

Lending and licensing firm Kabbage has confirmed the acquisition of Orchard, subject to standard closing conditions.

Rumours first broke of the acquisition earlier this month, but neither side chose to comment. We now learn that the deal will allow Kabbage to integrate Orchard’s technology platform into its own, driving enhanced data capabilities and furthering its product development.

Orchard’s CEO and co-founder Matt Burton and fellow co-founder and chief analytics officer David Snitkof will join Kabbage’s leadership team when the transaction closes. Together they will help to oversee the integration and future innovation.

More than twenty Orchard employees – predominantly focused on advanced analytics, data science and engineering – will be given jobs at Kabbage’s New York City office. Orchard currently lists 48 employees on LinkedIn, but may have more.

Burton said that the Orchard team is ‘very excited’ to join forces with ‘a true innovator’. It is not clear at this stage how much Kabbage paid for the acquisition. 

There are a number of strings to Orchard’s bow, but fundamentally it was a business designed to match institutional investors with alternative lenders via technology and data analytics. Its platform made use of sophisticated visualisation, augmentation and predictive modelling.

The SoftBank-backed Kabbage will seek to apply these tools to enhance its own operations, in pursuit of greater efficiency and effectiveness, better underwriting, and to offer data-driven insights to its business customers.

“As a strategic customer of Orchard, we know firsthand of the company’s prowess with predictive analytics and advanced automation,” said Rob Frohwein (pictured), CEO of Kabbage. “We are impressed with the company’s mission and capabilities, but above all, we believe in the team. At Orchard, they accomplished extraordinary feats in the financial services industry, championing a segment of the market unmatched by any other. Applying their skillset to a common purpose at Kabbage will more rapidly accelerate our growth and continue our leadership in data-first products for small businesses.”