P2P lending platform Orca has raised £577,280 in an equity funding round to support its ‘ambitious’ growth plans for 2019.
The company has its eyes on a launch of a multi-platform ISA early this year.
Funds were raised via a crowdfunding campaign on the Seedrs site, with more than 400 individual investors contributing. A pre-money valuation for the company during it’s fundraise, which launched in November 2018, was established as £1.7m.
Alongside this, the FinTech received funds from a series of venture capital funds and private angel investors. Some notable ones were TechstartNI, Clarendon Fund Managers, and ESM Investments.
Current ISA rules specify people they can divide their tax-year ISA allowance of £20,000 between ISA accounts, such as cash, stocks and shares, however they wish. Although, they can only subscribe current tax-year subscriptions, making it hard to build diverse portfolios.
Orca’s ISA differs by letting investors hold multiple P2P providers in a single IF ISA. Other benefits include up to 6.5 per cent interest, and tax-free returns.
In addition to the launch of an ISA service, Orca will release a ‘Self-Select portfolio builder tool which will enable investors to implement their own strategies and select only the P2P providers and products they want in their portfolio.
Orca CEO Iain Niblock said, “We’re delighted with the success of our recent funding round, particularly the response from the crowd who really got behind us. 2019 will be a landmark year for Orca as we roll-out new products to fulfil the needs of investors.
“The Orca ISA will be the first multi-platform ISA of its kind, combined with the launch of our Self-Select portfolio builder, we are confident that Orca can develop into the go to platform for peer to peer investing.’
UK-based Orca is an online peer-to-peer lending platform which can offer users the ability to invest across a variety of platforms from a single location. Through the aggregator, users can invest in loans on Choice, LendingCrowd, LendingWorks, Landbay and Assetz Capital.
The company offers investors a cross-platform and borrower diversified portfolio, and a single platform to deposit their funds and monitor investments. Orca handles all of the admin processes on the various investing websites, creating accounts and deploying capital into loan opportunities.
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