Prospa, An Online Business Lender, Goes Public In Australia

Another online small business lender has gone public. This time it’s Australia-based Prospa, a company founded in Sydney in 2012. Prospa offers daily and weekly payment business loans with terms from 3-24 months and competes with companies like OnDeck and Capify.

Earlier this year Prospa surpassed $1 billion in loans funded to 19,000 small businesses. In a 2015 interview with deBanked, cofounder Beau Bertoli said, “The market in Australia has been very ripe for alternative finance. We see an opportunity for the alternative finance segment to be more dominant in Australia than it is in America.”

Prospa was slated to go public on the Australian Securities Exchange last June but it was cancelled in dramatic fashion 15 minutes before being listed as rumors swirled that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) had questions about their business practices. By September, Prospa agreed to revise its loan disclosures to be more fair. Those revisions were published by ASIC.

Prospa’s IPO raised AUS $110 million and was valued at AUS $610 million. The share price jumped nearly 20% in early trading on Tuesday.