UK-based Zebit has linked up with Mohr Davidow Ventures to fund the next stage of its payment platform’s development.

Short-term lending platform Zebit has secured $25 million (£16 million) worth of equity funding as part of its Series D fundraising.

The UK service, which is owned by California-based Global Analytics Holdings, will use the capital to fund its platform-as-a-service in the financial sector as well as the growth of its micro-lending business.

The funding round has been led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, with further participation form Crosslink Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and QED Investors.

Bryan Stolle, general partner at Mohr Davidow, says that Zebit’s initial launch in the UK has produced a profitable $50 million+ business.

He adds, ‘We think this is an exceptional team chasing a very big opportunity, and we’re thrilled to be a strategic partner in this venture.

‘Zebit fits right in with one or our major themes around big data, analytics-driven insights and execution to disrupt and/or create major markets.’

Michael Thiemann, CEO of Zebit, says that unlike its competitors underwrite solely on the individual, in Zebit’s UK micro-lending launch market it found that by using adaptive data fusion it has achieved better, more accurate risk assessments to identify responsible customers and then pass savings along to them.

Thiemann explains that adaptive data fusion refers to a science normally used in military and wireless sensor process and involves taking big, complex streams of data from multiple sources and transforming them into inferences that are ‘superior’ to using the data streams individually.

To date, Zebit has completed over a million transactions through its platform.