Ocrolus Partners with Kiva to Provide Funding and Publish its Customers’ Stories

Ocrolus has announced a partnership with Kiva, the Californian non-profit that provides loans to entrepreneurs in countries underserved by funding options. The deal comes after news of Ocrolus’s partnership with Plaid in December, a venture that helped launch the Ocrolus+ platform.

As part of Kiva’s work to help global small business owners, it publishes the stories of those entrepreneurs, charting how they set up their business and what led them to do it. Ocrolus will follow Kiva’s suit with this partnership, as it plans to publish the stories of its own fintech customers. Aiming to highlight the biographies of those businesses and entrepreneurs that have excelled in the alternative finance and fintech industries, Ocrolus will provide $5,000 for Kiva-backed loans for each story published to its site. If the published business chooses to match this funding, Ocrolus will put forward a further $5,000, bringing the total appropriation for Kiva to $15,000.

Speaking on the partnership, Ocrolus’s COO Vikas Dua told deBanked that the inspiration for the deal came after listening to a podcast that featured one of the co-founders of Toms, a company known for its ‘one for one’ policy which sees a pair of shoes being donated to children in need for every pair bought.

“The best part of Kiva is the types of folks you’re helping and the impact you can have. They do a great job of sharing stories of entrepreneurs and folks in need,” Dua said in a call. “Everyone’s incentives are tied together. Overall, we’re just very excited about the mission and very excited not only to tell our customers’ stories, but also to highlight some of the things we’re doing for the folks that Kiva interacts with and they fund. They have some wonderful stories there and we’re excited to share those as well.”

Brendan Garrett was a Reporter at deBanked.