The company has developed an end-to-end operating system designed to streamline the operations for lenders, credit investors, corporates, and servicers in the alternative credit sector.

The fresh injection of capital comes just nine months after the firm raised a $4.5 million pre-seed funding round and will be used to hire more staff and expand into continenental Europe.

Kennek was founded in 2021 by Thibault Lancksweert, Edmund Parsons and Xavier De Pauw, with decades of experience in the credit industry. De Pauw, who previously worked in structured finance at Merrill Lynch and built challenger bank MeDirect, has first-hand experience with the challenges faced by lenders in the capital markets.

“Lenders are really just at the start of the digitalisation journey. kennek is here to help accelerate that journey and provide them with the tools to capitalise on the growth of the non-bank lending space.”, says De Pauw. “Until Kennek, lenders had to devote countless hours to menial operational tasks and deal with jumbled and hard-coded data - which makes every other part of lending a headache. As former lenders ourselves, we lived and breathed these frustrations, and built Kennek to make them a thing of the past.”

Kennek is working with existing lenders and banks, but also with new lenders that can be launched efficiently with Kennek’s complete lender-in-a-box. As such, Kennek plays the role of lender incubator offering credit expertise, the full operating system and access to institutional funding. Corporates also use kennek to offer embedded credit and to manage their receivables financing.

Thibault Lancksweert, founder of Kennek, says: “One of the unique things about the Kennek platform is that it can cater for all different types of B2B loans: bridge & development loans, SME term loans, R&D and grant advances… to name just a few. And we’re seeing strong demand across the board."