Funding Circle welcomes new investor Castlelake

London, 11 August 2026 - Funding Circle, the UK's leading SME finance platform, today announces a new funding agreement with Castlelake, a global alternative investment manager, that will provide up to £500m of committed funding to UK small businesses over a two-year period. The agreement welcomes Castlelake as a new investor on the Funding Circle platform.

More than 15 years of investment and innovation in Funding Circle's technology and data capabilities has created powerful, proprietary credit models that discriminate risk three times better than traditional bureau scores. Funding Circle's platform enables institutional investors to access a hard-to-reach asset class, diversify their portfolios, and deploy capital at scale to thousands of small businesses across every corner of the UK.

This agreement with Castlelake further diversifies Funding Circle's pool of institutional funders, which includes banks, asset managers, pension funds, insurance companies and government-backed entities. The large pool of institutional lenders supports Funding Circle's capital-light business model, enabling the business to scale efficiently, while underlining the continued appeal of UK SME lending as an asset class that delivers robust, attractive returns to platform investors.

Dipesh Mehta, Chief Capital Officer at Funding Circle, said: "We're delighted to welcome Castlelake as a new investor to the platform. Continuing to attract new institutional capital reflects the performance of our technology, data and credit expertise, and the attractive returns our platform has been able to deliver. This agreement further expands our deep and diverse funding base and means we can say yes to even more small businesses, putting vital funding to work to support the real economy and drive economic growth across the UK."

"We are pleased to begin a new relationship with Funding Circle," said Aadit Prasad, Managing Director, European Head of SME & Leasing at Castlelake. "We believe its platform, technology and data capabilities provide an efficient means of deploying capital into the UK SME sector, an area we see as an opportunity to both support small businesses across the country and provide our investors with attractive risk-adjusted exposure."