Twinco Capital, a supplier finance solution provider, has signed a €50mn debt facility with BBVA’s tech funding arm to support the further growth of its offering.

Founded in 2019 by banking veterans Sandra Nolasco and Carmen Marín, Twinco engages with large corporations, mostly in the retail and apparel sectors, and offers funding to their suppliers worldwide, advancing up to 60% of the purchase order value upfront and paying the remainder upon delivery.

The company will use the funds from BBVA Spark, the Spanish bank’s business unit for high-growth companies, to expand its lending activities.

“This facility will support the company’s portfolio growth, expanding both the number of customers and geographies,” says Nolasco, Twinco’s CEO.

To date, Twinco has provided over US$250mn in finance to more than 150 suppliers in 13 different countries, including Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.

“We are very pleased to support Sandra and Carmen, two entrepreneurs who have reinvented, with Twinco, the way supply chains are financed on a global scale by incorporating innovative environmental and social criteria into their supplier financing model,” says Roberto Albaladejo, head of BBVA Spark.

To enable it to provide financing at the purchase order stage – rather than against invoices as is generally the case in supply chain finance programmes – Twinco has developed its own risk model that uses machine learning to analyse suppliers’ commercial performance and ESG data in addition to the more traditional financial metrics used in credit decisioning. As a result, it says that it is well-positioned to provide its customers not only with funding but also with data-based insights that can help SMEs produce products responsibly.

“The value added Twinco is providing to customers stems from the combination of its unique funding solution with business intelligence that provides a holistic overview of supply chain risk,” says Marín, Twinco’s COO. “Technology and machine learning provide invaluable data insights on commercial, financial and ESG suppliers’ performance, giving our customers a state-of-the-art supply chain risk management tool.”

This is the latest successful fundraising round for the company. In January this year, it raised US$12mn in an equity and debt round, with investors including Quona Capital, Working Capital Fund, Mundi Ventures and Finch Capital.

With this latest cash injection, Twinco says BBVA Spark now becomes one of its “key financial partners”, joining EBN Banco de Negocios and Zubi Capital.