The Irish P2P platform raised €10m of a targeted €50m (approximately £45m) debt financing round, which it announced in April this year.

The new investment comes from professional investors, including Eiffel Investment Group.

The funding will be available to SMEs borrowing through the platform from August 2018 and will enable Flender to approve and fund deals at a quicker pace, as well as increasing its maximum loan size.

Currently, the maximum loan amount available through Flender is around €100,000 (approximately £89,900), which will now increase to €200,000 (approximately £179,900).

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“Essentially, Flender aims to bring speedy finance to SMEs, while letting the public earn a good return,” said Kristjan Koik, CEO at Flender (pictured above).

“We offer established small businesses an innovative way to access finance so they can get on with growing their business, all via a seamless mobile user experience.”

Flender was established by Kristjan and co-founders Oli Cavanagh and Jeremy Davies and is backed by Enterprise Ireland and a number of known entrepreneurs.

Since launch, Flender has helped Irish SMEs raise more than €2.5m (approximately £2.2m) and created 192 new jobs.