Uncapped, a London-based startup changing the way online companies fund their growth and inventory costs, has today announced that it will offer 1,000 European founders up to £50,000 in fee-free capital.
Uncapped’s fee-free funding offer is inspired by its founders’ own frustrating experiences of getting funding for their first businesses. It also meets the needs of the thousands of startup brands, particularly in the ecommerce sector, who missed out on vital growth opportunities in 2020’s Golden Quarter because they could not access the capital they needed from traditional funding sources.
Uncapped has seen a 28% rise in funding applications in advance of Black Friday, driven by growing numbers of ecommerce businesses looking to borrow funds now to secure the future success of their businesses.
Uncapped’s founders, Asher Ismail and Piotr Pisarz, set-up the company in 2019 to meet the finance needs of digital-first entrepreneurs. Uncapped has seen a sharp rise in demand for its services since its launch as a result of the e-commerce boom, partly driven by the pandemic. The company believes that the sizable ecommerce sector requires much more capital than existing VCs or banks can provide. Legacy banks can struggle to understand how new entrepreneurs operate and neobanks lack credit offerings and can still be slow. VC’s require a percentage of equity ownership and a round can take months to close. This is in contrast to Uncapped which charges only a flat fee and can fund a business in 24 hours.
Asher Ismail, co-founder of Uncapped, said: “Uncapped was born out of my own frustrations when trying to secure capital to launch and run my first business. I didn’t want to take financing from the banks because they all wanted personal guarantees and venture capital wasn’t ideal as I didn’t want to lose equity. This meant I repeatedly missed out on growth opportunities. With this fee-free funding offer we aim to help 1,000 more businesses across the UK and Europe grow to their full potential.”
Since its launch, Uncapped has grown to become the largest ecommerce investor in Europe, now funding more businesses each day than a typical VC will fund in a year. The company has enjoyed 10x year on year growth to the month of September 2021 – Uncapped deployed more funding in September 2021 than it did in the whole of 2020.
Piotr Pisarz, co-founder of Uncapped, said: “As startup founders ourselves, we felt it was vital to help our fellow founders secure inventory finance in advance of Black Friday. Our economy is changing, with digital native businesses contributing an ever-increasing share to overall GDP. It is in everyone’s interest to ensure these businesses are successful, yet time and again we see their need for fast, flexible finance is not met. We’re delighted to offer them a valuable boost to their business by making it easier and cheaper to secure finance to drive their company’s future success.”
