The heads of French franchise networks, called franchisors, are largely SMEs, lead to many strategies, which require financing not systematically insured by banks and capital-investors. They are therefore seeking to diversify their sources of funding. Crowdlending, participatory financing, which appeared in 2014, offers new perspectives. This paper investigates the motivations and the process of financing network heads by crowdlending, by studying the complementary nature and the additional non-financial contributions of this new means of funding. Two exploratory case studies of two franchise networks have shown that crowdlending is indeed a complementary source of financing, in that it makes it possible to bridge the shortfall in particular of bank financing and also is a tool for developing franchise networks by the communication it engenders. JEL Codes: G32, L14, L21