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Propello Cloud, a Manchester-based online customer rewards SaaS platform, has secured a £250,000 loan from NatWest using its intellectual property (IP) as collateral, helped by Inngot’s online IP identification, valuation and collateral suitability checking tools.
The platform allows business-to-business and business-to-consumer client companies to easily build their own fully branded yet quick to implement “plug-and-play” rewards and partnership programmes. This adds value for the clients’ end-customers and reduces churn. Users include retailers, financial services providers, insurers, telecoms companies, utilities, health and fitness operators, and membership bodies.
The business was founded by CEO Mark Camp and COO George Charlesworth as a spin-out from integrated marketing agency Workhouse in 2020.
Mark said: “In the last year, we’ve really seen significant growth and working with global clients such as JD Sports, Lebara Mobile, and HelloFresh is testament to the effectiveness of our solution. However, working with large clients like these requires investment – there’s both human and technology overheads. The funding we’ve secured from NatWest won’t just go on growth in sales and marketing support, it will allow us to invest in our product and bring in extra developers to build our roadmap, drive competitive advantage and think about things like AI.”
The company expects to recruit five new staff, increasing total headcount to more than 20.
Mark added that the firm had not been actively looking to get new funding at this point – but when he heard about the new IP-backed loan at a NatWest event, he saw it as “the perfect sort of stepping-stone funding, allowing us to get the money to grow without having to have another funding round and founders or existing investors having to sacrifice any more equity at this point. This is absolutely the best solution for companies that won’t traditionally get standard debt – and the cost of getting the IP-backed loan is cheap money in this day and age.”
NatWest launched its IP-backed loan for high growth companies in January 2024, for loan amounts from £250,000 up to £10m. Up to 50% of the value of the firm’s IP, as assessed by IP evaluation experts Inngot via its online IP identification and valuation tools, can be used as security. The IP-backed loan targets growth companies which are rich in intangible assets, but have few tangible assets, making it difficult for them to get traditional lending from banks.
Mark Camp said: “NatWest’s support, through our Relationship Manager Fiona, and Inngot’s support as we were going through their online tools, were pretty seamless. I filled in most of the questions myself, with a bit of input from our finance director.”
Fiona Bermingham, NatWest Senior Relationship Manager based in Manchester, said: “It’s great to be able to support a growing business that traditionally we haven’t been able to fund. We’ve managed to reduce the cost of capital they were offered from external funders from 19% to 8%, which has saved the business money at a crucial point in their growth.”
Neil Bellamy, Head of Technology, Media, Telecoms & Services (TMT) at NatWest, said: “Today’s high growth companies, like Propello Cloud, simply don’t have the kind of tangible assets that traditional bank lending is still focused on. Instead, they have IP and intangibles which have until now been difficult for banks to take into account.”
Martin Brassell, CEO of Inngot, said: “With NatWest’s IP-backed loan, IP and intangibles can be recognised and valued as business-critical assets and used as collateral, even for smaller loans. This latest deal is further evidence that IP-backed finance is the route forwards for funding scale-up companies.”
