Imagine coordinating a global fundraising round between numerous potential investors. All of them need different access to huge amounts of your proprietary information and documentation, and they all need to communicate with one another easily and securely.

No easy task, yet one that faced OakNorth - a UK challenger bank - last year.

Founded in 2015 by Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman as a "bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs", OakNorth is one of the market leaders in lending to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). To date, they’ve lent over $1.3bn to UK businesses and have over 20,000 retail deposit customers.

In October 2017, they secured a $213m (£160m) investment from Singapore investment group The Clermont Group, UK hedge fund Toscafund, and Coltrane Asset Management for a c.16% stake. That valued the company at $1.3bn, taking it to “unicorn” status. This was followed up by a secondary investment of $120m (£90m) from GIC - Singapore’s state-owned sovereign wealth fund - just one month later.

Where virtual data rooms come in…

In managing this fundraise, and at the start of the due diligence process, OakNorth’s founders knew they needed a simple and reliable virtual data room (VDR) - an online repository that allows multiple parties to store and share critical information securely - to share highly confidential documents with potential investors.

Enter EthosData.

We’ve been the banker, the corporate lawyer and the investor. We know how complex and difficult these deals can be and that’s why we built EthosData’s VDRs with a clear goal: to simplify financial transactions.

EthosData’s VDR allowed OakNorth to:

• Access a team of professional deal coordinators who were able to set them up quickly and manage their dealroom for them.
• Share all their documents with potential investors, restricting access and what someone could do with a given file where needed.
• Protect highly sensitive information in a dealroom that never goes offline.
• Simplify the communication flow and structure between all potential investors.
• Run a smooth transaction that saw them close the largest funding deal ever achieved by a UK FinTech firm.   

Why this was so important... 

OakNorth’s financing helps them boost lending by an additional $2 billion in 2018, and launch their inhouse lending platform, ACORN, to other lenders and global banks. ACORN is designed to enable lenders to originate, underwrite, monitor and book bespoke loans to SMEs faster, more efficiently and with more rigour.

“EthosData’s platform is very easy to use and their support team are really helpful. Having a dedicated team available 24/7 was particularly useful given that our prospective investors were based in different geographies. It was a great service.”

Joel Perlman

Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at OakNorth