<article>Australia-based VC firm <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/?s=AirTree+Ventures" target="_blank">AirTree Ventures</a> has led a $25 million investment into online lender Prospa, in a deal claimed to be “the largest fintech venture capital investment in an Australian business”.</article>

Australia-based VC firm <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/?s=AirTree+Ventures" target="_blank">AirTree Ventures</a> has led a $25 million investment into online lender Prospa, in a deal claimed to be “the largest fintech venture capital investment in an Australian business”.
Prospa said it will use the funds to boost technology, product expansion and distribution, as well as ramping up talent acquisition.
Greg Moshal, Founder and joint CEO of Prospa said continued interest from top tech investors like Airtree, and the scale of their investment, means recognition of the difficulties that small business have in accessing finance. The funding, he said, will be the main driver to support Prospa in its growth phase.
&#8220;We’re driving a fundamental change in the way 2 million small business owners in Australia access finance,” Moshal said.
“We’ve now provided over 10,000 loans and put over $250 million into the Australian small business economy. All the while maintaining our ability to wow our customers, which continues to be proven through a stellar customer satisfaction score of over 90%,” he added.
In passing loans, Prospa inked strategic partnerships with Westpac, Reckon and Mortgage Choice, who have helped offer Prospa’s loans to their customers. Strategic partnerships have always been and will continue to be Prospa’s strategy in driving growth.
Commenting on Prospa’s latest round, AirTree Ventures’ managing partner, Craig Blair, said: “This is a coming of age of the fintech sector in Australia. Prospa is a real business solving a real problem, winning awards with tremendous customer and market feedback while achieving profitability from the very early days.”
Last September, AirTree Ventures closed a venture fund with a corpus of A$250 million ($187 million). That makes it, to date, the largest venture capital fund in Australia. The limited partners (LPs) of the fund originated from two large Australian superannuation funds and a range of family offices. In addition, to this are a number of high net worth individuals (HNIs).
The fund is managed by Daniel Petre and managing partner Craig Blair and follows the formation of an A$60 million fund in July 2014. This surpasses the A$200 million fund launched by BlackBird Ventures, which was launched in November 2015.
These latest capital commitments raised by AirTree fund will be evenly divided into two funds – the AirTree Opportunity fund and Airtree Ventures 2 Core –  with the first being an opportunity fund targeting later-stage investments and the latter targeting seed, Series A and Series B funding. The ticket size of such investments will range from A$200,00 to A$5 million.
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Australia: AirTree Ventures leads $25m round for online lender Prospa

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