funding

CommunityLend Raises 1.5 Million CAN$

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CommunityLend has closed a 1.5 million CAN$ private placement from several individual angel investors and an institutional investment fund. The proceeds of this private placement will go to scaling up loan origination, loan adjudication, and loan servicing operations, the company says, continuing:

This investment comes on the heels of a successful year since our launch as Canada’s 1st (and only) online consumer loan marketplace by CommunityLend Inc. Monthly loan volume has more than doubled each of the last 3 months and we are projecting this pace of growth to continue throughout 2011.

(Source: Communitylend blog)

New VC round for Smava

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German p2p lending Smava completed another financing round. The new capital raised comes from the VCs that already invested in earlier rounds.

Earlybird increased their investment from previously 39% of shares to now 56% and Neuhaus Partners increased their part from 12.5% of share to now 17%.

The original founders Alexander Artopé, Sebastian Rieschel and Eckart Vierkant now combined hold less than 8%.

Speculation is that the high customer acquisition costs (especially for borrowers) led to the need for another financing round. Estimates put the cost for borrower acquisition as high as 500 Euro. In certain customer acquisition partnerships, Smava pays the partner up to 1.3% of the loan amount (equals 650 Euro for a borrower with the maximum loan amount of 50,000 Euro). While Smava is growing, the growth rate has in the past months stopped to accelerate and is about 2 million Euro funded loan volume per month (chart).

P2P Lending Site Ratesetter Raises another 600k

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UK p2p lending service Ratesetter has raised another 600,000 GBP from undisclosed existing and new investors. The total equity funding of the company now is 1.5 million GBP. The additional funding will be used for marketing purposes.

RateSetter co-founder and CEO Rhydian Lewis said: “We’re thrilled that RateSetter has earned the confidence of some well-respected investors. The response to RateSetter has been very positive and has exceeded our expectations. Our users enjoy the benefits of high returns on their savings and low cost, flexible borrowing.”

P2P-Banking.com wrote an review on Ratesetter when they launched in October 2010 (RateSetter brings rolling monthly loans to p2p lending). Since then the company grew considerably reaching 2 million GBP lent by lenders in the first two month.

If you are a Ratesetter lender or borrower please do share your experiences and opinions. Write a review on Wiseclerk’s Ratesetter forum. Thank you.

Prosper Raises 14.7 million US$ Series D Funding

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Prosper Marketplace Inc., has successfully closed a the new funding round, which it announced two weeks ago.  Prosper receives 14.7 million US$ from new investors Tomorrow Ventures and CompuCredit Holdings and existing investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Omidyar Network, QED Investors and Volition Capital. TomorrowVentures is the investment vehicle for Google CEO Eric Schmidt.