No, they didn't need bitcoin to go up. The only thing they needed was their coin value to increase more than the interest they paid (over any time period they chose), or it would start costing them more in BCC than was lent to them and this would in time eat into their reserves (they were profitable so obviously never even had to use their BCC reserves and could easily have carried on). They hopefully also had bitcoin reserves from the ICO but the lending was profitable so didn't really need it once they'd used the ICO funds for development and marketing etc.