Florence.Finance Funding
![](https://cdn.florence.finance/blog/2022/09/1-XZzZUrJYZhqwpkTD_60GnA.png)
Just over a year ago I seed-funded Florence.Finance with five other founders that believed in the idea of building a crypto-funded, Euro-denominated, SME lending business initially envisaged as a "safe haven" to weather the crypto winter.
Since then we have raised more than 3 million USDC through MDC token sale agreements with Ascendex, Big Brain Holdings, Bixin Ventures, CoinIX, FocusLabs, Lunatic Capital, Nothing Research, Newform Capital & Fox Ventures who all second our belief that real-world lending is the next frontier of DeFi.
As well as the above, we have recently also secured another 6 million USDC in actual funding for the initial lending pools on the Florence.Finance platform from NewForm Capital and two of my fellow founders.
Now that we have launched the public beta version of our protocol and as we ramp up our lending activity through our launching partners we are actively looking to add more whitelisted primary funders (unfortunately KYC/AML vetting is a necessary evil for the purposes of real-world lending until we implement on-chain transaction verification) for the lending pools and we have some exciting newsflow in that regard in the coming months.
We have funded the first two loans (€2m over the summer period) and have another €6m in loans in the pipeline that could fund as early as this month. We are currently looking for an additional €2m in funding for the Caple lending pool specifically and will be continuing to secure whitelisted funding until our 3rd party funding pool is launched on Curve and we have implemented transaction verification software. If you are keen to help please reach out and we can get you vetted, signed up, and plugged into our journey.