British app-based Atom Bank has unveiled plans to raise £40m ($56m) from existing shareholders ahead of potential IPO next year.

The bid to raise fresh capital comes close on the heels of the bank achieving profitability driven by mortgage and business lending.

Atom CEO Mark Mullen said: “We turn to our shareholders for capital as and when we need it to drive growth.

“Despite it being a difficult environment for all companies that need to raise funding, this capital raise will allow us to continue to progress towards profitability and ever-improving levels of efficiency and engagement.”

Atom noted that it can increase SME lending to over £700m ($976m) by the end of March, which would be three times the value of its business loans in the last 12 months.

Additionally, neobank said it added £0.6bn ($0.8bn) of instant saver balances through its newly launched Instant Saver platform to the current £1.7bn ($2.3bn) worth fixed-rate savings.

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Talking about the IPO, Mullen said: “The team retains an IPO as our objective and we’ll take the business there when we and the markets are ready. After the year that’s just gone I’m not going to claim perfect foresight, but we’re looking at the financial year 2022/23 as our IPO target.”

Launched in 2016, mobile-only bank offers fixed savings accounts and business loans for small and medium-sized enterprises (‘SMEs’).

Atom offers its savings products and services through Thought Machine’s Vault platform.

Last year, Atom partnered with UK fintech Thought Machine to integrate cloud-based core banking tools into its platform.

Recently, it partnered with an open finance platform Plaid to offer open banking services to its customers, including SMEs.