Funding Circle lent more than $5 billion globally to small businesses through the Funding Circle platform since launching in 2010. The company supported a network of 40,000 businesses across the UK, USA, Germany and the Netherlands and helped to create more than 100,000 new jobs.

The news follows a record November for Funding Circle globally with the business facilitating more than $260 million of lending, including £130 million ($175 million) in the UK, $70 million in the U.S. and €14.5 million ($15 million) in Continental Europe. Together this has helped thousands of business owners to access fast, transparent finance to grow their businesses, and will lead to an estimated 7,500 new jobs.

With U.S. businesses now having accessed more than $1 billion in funding through the platform, Funding Circle becomes the first lending platform anywhere in the world to have facilitated more than $1 billion across two markets. Since 2014, Funding Circle has helped approximately 6,700 U.S. businesses access financing. In a recent survey of U.S. business owners who have borrowed through Funding Circle, 92% said they would come back to Funding Circle for their future business financing needs, 85% said their experience was faster than their previous borrowing experience, and 73% said it was more transparent.

Samir Desai, CEO and co-founder of Funding Circle, said, “Today’s milestones now make Funding Circle the world’s largest small business lending platform by loans outstanding and new monthly originations. We are proud to see that Funding Circle is quickly becoming the first choice for finance for small businesses globally. With revenues growing 80% in 2017 and our UK business cash-flow positive, we look forward to continuing to build on the strong foundations we have put in place this year and helping many more thousands of businesses in 2018.”

Speaking about the success of the U.S. business, Sam Hodges, co-founder and U.S. managing director of Funding Circle, said: “Small businesses are responsible for most net new jobs in America. Yet too many of them can’t expand because of difficulty obtaining an affordable loan. Our platform enables growth in the real economy, by more efficiently connecting this unmet credit demand to credit supply in the form of fixed-income investors.”

Launched in 2010, the Funding Circle model opened up small business lending to a wide range of investors, including 70,000 individuals, local and national government, the European Investment Bank and financial institutions such as pension funds.