Kabbage, a company with some 115,000 customers and $3.5 billion in loans that has built an automated platform for lending money to small businesses and individuals using a large set of data points to determine a customer’s credit score, is announcing some big cabbage of its own today.

 
SoftBank Group is investing $250 million in Kabbage — funding that Rob Frohwein, the co-founder and CEO, said the company plans to use to expand its business in the U.S.; launch yet more analytics tools to provide loans for specific verticals; expand into new markets like Asia; and to explore acquisitions to add new products to its business, like payments.
 
The investment, a Series F, brings the total raised by Kabbage in equity funding to $500 million (on top of some $3.5 billion in securities), and will give a bump to the company’s billion-dollar-plus valuation.
 
For some context: In 2015, when it raised a Series E of $135 million, Kabbage entered the so-called echelon of “unicorn” startups with a valuation of $1 billion. In an interview with TechCrunch this week, CEO and co-founder Rob Frohwein declined to name a specific number but said that this latest investment was at a “meaningful upround” that was more than $1.25 billion but not quite $2 billion.
 
Read the full article on TechCrunch here.