London fintech kennek raises $4.5 million in pre-seed funding

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

In its first year of trading, kennek has already hired 20 full-time employees, and launched a plug-and-play operating system covering a wide range of lenders and credit products. The company’s UK operations have already secured commercial gains with clients operating in SME lending, R&D credit and commercial property.

kennek was founded in 2021 by Thibault Lancksweert, Edmund Parsons and Xavier De Pauw, to solve two major pain points: operational scalability for lenders and investors; and more efficient financing of credits. The financing round was led by Dutch Founders Fund, ffVC and Plug and Play Ventures.

De Pauw, who previously worked in structured finance at Merrill Lynch and built the challenger bank MeDirect, has first-hand experience of the challenges lenders face in the capital markets.

With decades of experience in the credit sector, the kennek founders could see many operational pain points and challenges facing lenders. The alternative lending industry is still largely run on manual workflows and with data that lives in spreadsheets.

As a result of these outdated processes, lenders are not cost-effective and struggle to access funding from institutional investors who require reliable and connected data, and robust and scalable processes. This insight became the basis for kennek, a vertically integrated SaaS that solves these multiple pain points at once.

The ultimate goal of kennek is to make scalable and robust lending infrastructure available to everyone to facilitate more funding to flow to the real economy.
kennek works with existing lenders and banks, but also with new lenders who can be launched effectively with kennek’s complete lender-in-a-box. As such, kennek plays the role of lender incubator offering credit expertise, the entire operating system and access to institutional funding.

Companies also use kennek to offer embedded credit and to manage receivables financing.

Laurens Groenendijk of the Dutch Founders Fund said: “De Pauw, Lancksweert and Parsons bring such varied and necessary experience together to address the inefficiencies of lending.”

“The uniquely designed product and lending rails that kennek is creating will make it much easier for lenders around the world to launch, operate and scale,” he added.

Xavier De Pauw, co-founder and CEO of kennek said:

“Our goal is to create a single point of truth for all stakeholders in the lending value chain,”

“This will help drive capital from institutional investors into the real economy, such as SMEs, property developers and businesses.”