Greg and Beau’s Prospa listed on the ASX closing the day ending up at a valuation of $750m.

It was just the other day that I was on the bus with Greg, who was on the way to work at his start up, where he was developing algorithms to work out the risk of lending money to SMEs .

Prospa  was being backed by their investors  when they had a  team of 30 writing around $26m of loans per year. 

Their mission – to help small business grow by making it easy for them to access money.

7 years later Prospa is now largest online lender to small businesses, lending circa $1b pa (circa. 5pc of the SMe market – employing over 200 people.

The business has a great culture with awesome people who seem to love what they do, and they do it well, and are proud to do it as a team with their core values being teamwork, speed, customer obsession, simplicity and boldness. 

Prospa raised $110 million from investors ahead of the IPO, valuing the company at $610 million. It listed at $3.78 and closed at $4.46, valuing the company at $720m

Airtree Ventures invested circa $30m in the various rounds and today , together with the other shareholders including AustralianSuper and Entree Capital , is their payday! 

This is a big day for Venture Capital in Australia !