Oxbury Bank raises another £20m in accelerated funding round

Agricultural bank Oxbury has swiftly followed-up its £31m Series C funding round in March with a further £20m in funding being announced today.

The add-on takes Oxbury’s total capital raised to £68m, an impressive feat for the bank which only opened its doors to customers in February 2021.

“We're feeling pretty good that, in a market where others are not managing to raise or finding it hard to raise, we have been able to talk to both our existing investor group and some new investors as well, and raise this funding” Oxbury co-founder and chief customer officer Tim Coates told AltFi, explaining that the plan hadn’t always been to raise funding again so soon.

“We were looking at this kind of number, maybe a bit later in the year.”

Fintech investment has taken a sharp turn in the past few weeks and months, with down rounds and layoffs impacting the sector, most notably with Klarna’s valuation tumbling by as much as 85 per cent and prominent sector investors marking down their holdings.

Among the investors participating in Oxbury’s round today are Frontier Agriculture and Hutchinsons Group, along with the bank’s existing investors Hambro Perks and Grosvenor Food & AgTech.

As part of today’s funding Oxbury also revealed it’s surpassed a £500m milestone of completed or in-progress lending, reaching the figure after just 15 months of lending.

The bank is now forecast to breakeven before the end of 2022, and Oxbury says it’s progressing well towards its previously announced £1bn lending milestone in 2024.

Since acquiring its core banking technology provider Naqoda as part of its Series C funding round, Oxbury has now rebranded the technology as Oxbury Earth and Coates says the next step will be to offer it up as a “banking as a service” solution beyond the UK.

“We are essentially the first customer of [Oxbury Earth] as a banking of the service proposition, which we intend to in the not too distant future take internationally,” said Coates.

“We think… that the challenges we're solving here in the UK, in terms of financing, particularly cash flow for farmers and the food production sector, is a global problem.”