MPower Financing has raised more funding on the heels of a $25 million round.
The D.C. student loan startup said this week it has secured an additional $5 million from ETS Strategic Capital, a new investment arm of Princeton, New Jersey-based ETS focused on expanding global research in education.
The investment builds on the round MPower closed in January, which was first reported by the Washington Business Journal. That capital came from New York investment firm Tilden Park Capital Management LP and created “an even bigger imperative for us to help out more students, to continue growing our team, to continue automating a lot of our processes and leveraging technology to scale faster,” co-founder and CEO Manu Smadja told us in January.
On the hiring front, the fintech company intends to hire more than 50 people for engineering, marketing, operations, analytics, finance, underwriting and HR positions — a move that would double the 7-year-old startup’s headcount. Today, MPower employs 50 people, with 20 in the District and 30 in Bangalore, India. And its D.C. office, which can accommodate up to 87 people, has room for that growth, Smadja told us previously.
MPower, which finances loans predominantly for international students coming to the U.S. and Canada for college degrees, has now raised about $60 million to date. That included $9 million in summer 2020 and an investment from Halcyon Angels.
“[Twenty-three] years ago, I remember driving 1 hour with my dad, at 6am on a Saturday, to go take the [Test of English as a Foreign Language] in Lyon, France. This was a critical step if I was to have a shot at studying in the US,” Smadja wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday. “Today, I'm super excited to be working with ETS, the administrators of the TOEFL and [the Graduate Record Examinations], and exploring ways to support the millions of students who test with them every year. By democratizing access to financing, I hope an even greater number of qualified students around the globe will venture to study in North America.”
We have reached out for additional comment and will update this post as we hear back.
MPower, founded in 2014, works with more than 350 colleges and universities to provide loans to students from more than 200 countries, amounting to more than $2 billion in loan applications on its platform. The company has doubled revenue each year since its inception and expects to continue that pace for 2021 — and enter double-digit revenue in 2021, Smadja said in January. “The global demand for student financing, especially from digital lenders, has never been higher.”
