New lender launches with £500m lending capital

Ignite Funding Partners (Ignite) has entered the UK lending market to fund UK businesses with tailored lending facilities of between £1m and £25m to support growth, acquisition, ownership transition and refinancing strategies.

To support the launch, £500m of lending capital is being lined up from leading institutional investors.

Ignite will focus on the larger end of the SME market, with the new lender’s proprietary analysis estimating a total addressable market of around £12bn a year.

Founder Ravi Anand (pictured above) is the former managing director of ThinCats and has recruited a number of senior ThinCats colleagues ahead of the launch. Between them, the team members have provided more than £2.5bn of funding to UK businesses over the last 10 years.

Ignite’s ambition is to be the funding partner of choice for proven UK businesses, along with their investors and advisers. Its lending approach is relationship-led, aiming to provide a consistent appetite, flexibility of funding structures and open communication at every stage.

This is empowered through data and purpose-built AI agents that swiftly analyse company information, allowing human judgement to focus on what matters.

Ravi commented: “Strong and growing businesses are vital to the UK economy, and they deserve a lender that understands them and backs them to enable their growth.

“As entrepreneurs ourselves, we know how business founders think and operate and the challenges they face, so we have created a funding platform that helps them by being relationship-focused, flexible and transparent.

“Ignite combines a highly experienced team with AI tools, which together ensure we can provide the right funding to scale businesses.

“We will be a genuine long-term partner to businesses, their advisers and investors in every region of the UK.”