Start-up lender eyes €100m Irish investment and hires staff

Addressing the Irish Independent, Ms Romanow said Clearco had already funded “around 20” Irish startups. These include Galway-based sustainable fuel company Ecofuel and Dublin-based second-hand baby items company Kindora.

They also include Dublin-based sports fashion company Gym + Coffee.

Clearco’s Series C funding round last year valued it at €1.8 billion.

“We are very bullish on Ireland and Europe,” Ms Romanow said. “We now have 75 people here in Ireland. We entered the UK just 18 months ago and it is now our second biggest market.

She said the company had invested $3.2 billion (2.9 billion euros) in more than 7,000 financing deals to date. “I expect us to invest the 100 million euros here within the year,” she said.

Clearco’s model is to lend between €10,000 and €20 million to applicants, who are quickly assessed based on data from their business and commercial accounts alone.

The money is then reimbursed as a percentage of the startup’s current income, for a total amount between 6 and 12 pc.

This e-commerce model is also used by Dublin-based startup Wayflyer, which recently landed its own €134 million funding round, valuing it at €1.4 billion. Founded by CEO Aidan Corbett and Jack Pierce, Wayflyer says its international capital deployment has now grown to 89 million euros per month.

Ms. Romanow said she does not see Wayflyer as a direct competitor to Clearco.

“I’m excited about people like Wayflyer,” she said. “The fact that they built a copy of what we were doing validates the category we’re in and also the size of the market, which is huge.”

Asked about the difference between the two companies, she replied that it depends on “size and scale”.

“We’ve been in this space for five years,” she said. “We have a whole team that helps businesses grow and evolve with our advice. We also have our own internal network of approved buyers and sellers. If you’re an e-commerce brand, you usually want to sell your business at some point. We actually sold 12 of our portfolio companies to different buyers. »

Ms. Romanow said that because Clearco’s funding decisions are largely automated based on company data rather than personal pitches, it ends up funding a higher proportion of startups led by women, people from color and those based outside of traditional technology hubs. Half of the businesses funded by Clearco are run by women.

“We fund 25 times more women-led businesses than traditional venture capital firms,” she said.

“But it’s not because we wanted to create a diversity fund. We literally went looking for good companies. We just looked at their data.

She said traditional venture capitalists have always obsessed over personality biases, such as where founders went to school.