A lot has happened at Silvr in the past few years. We’ve underwritten our 100th loan in the first year of founding the company in 2020. In our second year, we deployed €100 million of capital towards SMEs, becoming the fastest-growing neolender in continental Europe.
And now, the week that we’re celebrating Silvr’s 3rd birthday, we have some big news to share: we signed a new securitized facility of up to €200 million with Citi and Channel.
“We worked consistently since Silvr’s inception to raise the bar in structuring a resilient source of debt capital, in order to collaborate with prime institutional lenders - shares Benjamin Soussan, Chief Capital Officer of Silvr. - We are very excited that we were able to close a significant transaction, which is instrumental for Silvr’s growth.”
What’s ahead in 2023?
There is a big funding gap for SMEs trying to scale in Europe.
The most recent European Central Bank’s survey shows that things are looking better this year than at the end of 2022 for SMEs in the Eurozone: earnings continue to increase. However, with a 2.7% predicted contraction in corporate lending in 2023, many high-potential companies will have a harder time accessing the funding they need.
This is where Silvr comes in. The company will be able to help SMEs access capital up to €200 million worth of new loans, facilitating the development of businesses that need it the most. This means thousands of new companies will get access to funding within 48 hours.
When asked how they rate their current access to funding from a scale of 1 to 10, European SMEs give an average score of 4.2. We think this calls for an improvement: quick, easy, reliable access to financing needs to become the new industry standard. Silvr’s real-time data-scoring algorithms can score a business within hours – so we can now truly enable a future where short-term funding is more accessible to the companies that need it.
“Silvr currently originates loans for SMEs registered in France and Germany. However, our legal infrastructure from the very beginning has been set-up with an European expansion in mind. Now that we signed a new securitized facility, we will be exploring that, – reveals Nima Karimi, co-founder and CEO of Silvr. – We have seen great demand for our short-term loans in Germany, in the first 6 months after entering the market this year. We’re now on a mission to offer that same service to SMEs across Europe.”
