Peer-to-peer lending service Lendit has landed 10 billion won (USD $8.9m) in Series B funding from Korean venture capital company YellowDog, and the US’s Altos Ventures and Collaborative Fund.
Lendit was launched at the beginning of 2015 by Sungjoon Kim and since then has become the country’s leading P2P financial lending service. Like other platforms on the market, investors provide capital to people seeking loans online to help them achieve financial goals. According to the company, Lendit has loaned out a total of 47.4 billion won since it began operating.
The latest investment brings the company’s total venture capital to 17.3 billion won, including seed and Series A funding from Altos Ventures over the past two years. Collaborative Fund’s involvement is also significant, as the firm also invested in other peer-to-peer fintech startups Upstart and Earnest.
Lendit’s online loan application process is entirely automated and uses a ‘credit scoring model’ that was developed in-house to make credit assessments. Interest rates are customized to the customer and calculated by analyzing 250 different datapoints provided by NICE (National Information & Credit Evaluation), as well as user trends from Lendit’s website. Interest rates average around 10 percent, but can be as low as 4.5% — a competitive number compared to other P2P loan services.
In addition to this, Lendit also operates a real-time and diversified investment system named ‘Portfolio 2.0’. By simply entering the amount you want to invest, it analyzes your current investment propensity and recommends a portfolio type according to the expected annual return and loss ratio. The system is aimed to effectively give investors who aren’t very experienced a more stable investment, without having to analyze bonds one-by-one. So far, nearly 2 million investments have been made by Lendit users using this platform.
“Over the last two years, we’ve been able to verify our assumptions which were made when we founded the company, and now I believe it’s time to focus even more closely to make some clear progress,” said CEO of Lendit, Sungjoon Kim. “Through this investment we will recruit more developers and financial experts, and increase R&D to reach the top position in the personal loan industry.”
