Apparently Peermint.com has participated in the New Ventures BC competition.
The deadline for round 3 is August, 13th.
First prize is 60,000 CAN$ in cash plus 100,000 CAN$ proof of concept award.
Update: Peermint made round 2 but is not among the 30 startups in round 3
Some news from p2p lending in Asian markets:
Chinese PPdai.com (see earlier coverage) says it has received a first round of funding from Essentia Private equity. The amount was not disclosed.
On February 27th, Zopa's managing director Giles Andrews mentioned in a webchat "I have also been spending time in Asia and hope that we will launch in 2 very significant markets there in 2008, one of which we may even announce shortly….".
In the webchat Giles Andrews also said regarding the US market: "@Tealer We also think that our "competitors" over there are illegal, and I don't want to go to jail!".
Furthermore Zopa said it plans to launch an (optional) capital guarantee product in the UK market.
See earlier coverage of P2P-Banking.com on the p2p lending markets in Corea, China, India or Japan.
CommunityLend.com, which strives to be the first peer to peer lending service launching in Canada, has secured 2.5 million dollar venture capital. Furthermore CommunityLend announced winning Barry Campbell, former MP and Secretary to the Minister of Finance and Jim Jones, CEO of GMAC Residential Capital as additional directors.
In an email Co-Founder and CTO Colin Henderson told P2P-Banking.com: "… We have relaunched our site, as we move towards launch in early 08. The key aspects of this milestone for us, is securing our funding, appointment of our management team, and appointing our Board of Directors. From here we will move towards launch in early 08. "
Quoted from the CommunityLend website:
Share in the Rewards of Investing in People
The unsecured consumer loan marketplace in Canada exceeds $100 Billion in volume every year and generates interest payments on those loans exceeding $15 Billion annually. By definition, “unsecured” loans are often small loans used for purposes like funding a wedding or paying off high interest credit card debt and for which the lender has not taken security to support the loan.
Today in Canada, this very profitable industry is also a very closed industry, with only a handful of major companies involved. This means that a very small list of banks and credit cards companies are literally today the sole beneficiaries of one of this country’s most profitable industries.
CommunityLend intends to democratize lending in Canada by opening up this billion dollar industry to other Lenders interested in participating. Share the wealth, we like to say!
Lendingclub has received a 10.26 million US$ venture capital investment from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. The CEO Renaud Laplanche announced that the money will be used to expand Lendingclub beyond the Facebook platform.
In an interview, Daniel Ciporin of Canaan Partners says:
P2P services and functionality in general has been at the heart of web market disruption, from Ebay to MySpace to Facebook, using only a few of the most prominent examples. I think the opportunity is ripe now to apply P2P functionality in the consumer lending space, especially with the particular focus on pre-existing affiliations that Lending Club has.
Video on the Globefunder.com business model.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Globefunder team says it is aiming for millions of loans requiring full scalability of system.