Victory Park increases support to marketplace lender

Victory Park Capital has upped an existing credit facility for Elevate, the Texas-based online lender  by $100 million, bringing the size of the facility is $545 million., according to the statement.

Elevate, which announced the loan's increase Tuesday (28 July), the additional capital earmarked to support expansion of Elevate's credit products in the US and UK.

Representatives for Elevate and Victory Park declined to provide more detail on the terms of the loan.

Elevate is a privately held online lender focusing on the provision of credit to non-prime consumers. The company offers financial training, credit monitoring and interest rates that go down over time and has received investments from Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures.

While investor interest in online lending platforms has grown dramatically over recent years, the May resignation of Lending Club's chief executive and layoffs at other online lenders has dampened some of the enthusiasm for the burgeoning sector of the private debt market.

Despite these challenges, Victory Park's increase in its facility to Elevate comes as chief executive officer Ken Rees told Forbes magazine recently that Elevate hopes to launch its IPO early in 2017.

“The main thing that the IPO does for us is reduce our reliance on debt financing,” Rees told TechCrunch earlier this week. “Victory Park Capital has been a terrific partner, but that debt isn't free. Raising money in an IPO will support growth and drive down our cost of capital,” he added.

Victory Park is a Chicago-headquartered mid-market focused investment firm that counts asset management firms, pension plans, endowments, and others among its investors. The firm was founded in 2007 and maintains additional offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

In February, Victory Park hired former Goldman Sachs managing director Upacala Mapatuna as its first chief investment officer.