Fintech mortgage lender Perenna has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round exclusively from US venture capital firm IAG Silverstripe, AltFi reports.
Perenna lands $30m investment from IAG Silverstripe
According to AltFi, now that funding has been secured from IAG, also a backer of challenger Zopa, CEO Arjan Verbeek intends to launch Perenna’s 30-year mortgages imminently.
Verbeek says this is IAG Silverstripe’s “first investment in a pre-launch business. We see it as an endorsement of our mission to offer consumer-friendly mortgages and enable more people to become homeowners”.
“The mortgage market is an oligopoly controlled by a few banks thriving in the status quo, much to the detriment of consumers,” Verbeek tells AltFi.
Perenna, which is aiming to establish the UK’s first covered bond bank, obtained a banking licence with restrictions in August from UK regulators the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Utilising the covered bond market, the fintech mortgage lender intends to offer long-term fixed rate mortgages and “channel the trillions of pounds of insurance and pension monies into the UK real economy by improving the domestic capital markets”.
A covered bond is a debt security that is created from public sector loans or mortgage loans that are backed by a separate group of assets.