The FGB Digest brings you the latest news on the world’s fastest growing direct-to-consumer and challenger brands. In today’s edition: Stockupsmall.com launched by challenger cooperative; Credit Kudos raises £5m in Series A; and Slite raises USD$11m to challenge Google’s Drive. 

Stockupsmall.com launched by challenger cooperative 

Food and drink challenger brands have co-created a new website listing small suppliers still available to deliver DTC during lockdown, as they turn to e-commerce to offset plunging foodservice and retail sales.

Andrew Allen, Biff’s partner and non-executive director in a number of startups, started the list last week after texting a group of founders and discovering most were still able to ship their products. From an initial Google Sheet, the list was turned into online site stockupsmall.com - which already includes 220 brands.

“I didn’t expect it to gain the momentum it has, I literally put it together to highlight to the public there’s still a huge range of brands you can shop with if you want to stock up on something from smaller suppliers,” Allen said.

As you cannot directly purchase from the list, there is no commercial gain associated with the site, he added. Young Foodies is also working with its community to launch a solution which makes challenger brands’ online sales more viable, said co-founder Thea Alexander.

The web-list comes as startups and SMEs refocus their operations towards DTC after experiencing staggering levels of online growth, helping offset lost foodservice and retail revenues.

Credit Kudos raises £5m in Series A

Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5m in Series A funding.

Leading the round is AlbionVC. Calling itself a “challenger credit bureau,” Credit Kudos is using open banking to replace what it calls “traditional, narrow methods” of credit assessment in order to make credit fairer and more accessible. As it stands, credit scores are typically a blackbox and based on very primitive assumptions about a person’s financial health.

By securely analysing bank account data via open banking, Credit Kudos says it enables lenders to make faster and more informed credit decisions, while also reducing defaults — and, crucially, at a significantly lower cost than less scalable methods of assessment.

Last year the startup on-boarded over 50 new lenders ranging from FTSE100 firms to independent credit unions and community finance vendors. Most recently, Credit Kudos has partnered with a number of credit intermediaries including ClearScore, CarFinance 247, and Mojo Mortgages.

Slite raises USD$11m to challenge Google’s Drive

French startup Slite has raised a USD$11m Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook.

Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes to corporate policies, project documentation and product roadmaps. Services like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper have partly solved this issue by transforming documents into shareable links.

But Slite feel this is a mess as you have to grant access to the right people, share folders with your team and dig around multiple documents to find what you’re looking for. A new category of tools have solved that issue by expanding beyond documents to create a knowledge base for your company. Confluence and Notion are particularly popular among tech companies for instance.

Slite wants to build a product that is as simple to use as Google Docs but as powerful as Confluence. Companies with hundreds or thousands of employees should be able to use it without ever feeling lost.

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