Self Lender co-founder and CEO James Garvey is known to write regular company updates throughout the year, going as far as to pen a weekly newsletter to shareholders that individually celebrates the Self Lender team for contributing to the company’s goals.
This week, he’ll have an extra topic to write about.
On Tuesday, Self Lender completed a $5 million Series A financing round led by Silverton Partners, Deepspace Ventures and Accion Venture Lab. This marks Austin-based Silverton Partners second time investing in the company.
It's a new notch on a string of already impressive announcements. At the end of 2016, Garvey published “50 photos in 50 weeks — a year at Self Lender," a blog that recapped the significant growth the Austin startup experienced over the 12-month period, which included growing a customer base from just 10 in January to 7,000 by December.
Pretty impressive numbers for a fintech startup less than two years old.
“We're really proud that we've been able to grow so quickly since our September 2016 launch,” said Garvey. “We've created a great product that our customers love — and we're incredibly thankful that customer referrals have been the #1 source of customer acquisition. Building credit is extremely hard without help — and we're grateful for the opportunity to help people responsibly build credit."
The startup continues to surge ahead this year. Since this past January, the team has celebrated both its 10,000th and 20,000th active customers. Today, they have 24,000 people using Self Lender’s savings plans.
“We're on a mission to help 45 million Americans responsibly build credit,” said Garvey. “Now, we need to scale up and help serve everyone who needs Self Lender.”
Garvey said they will use the funding to expand their 13-person team, hiring for engineering and operations roles.
With a small team celebration in the works, Garvey jokingly said the bubbly will come out when the company goes public.
“We're saving the champagne until after we IPO,” Garvey said. “We have a big responsibility to execute on our mission as our shareholders and customers are counting on us. So, we're having a small celebration with some great Austin food and great company — and then we go back to crushing it."
Image provided by Instagram.
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