Eyes 5-fold growth in next 18 months – expand market footprint, accelerate product development and upgrade technology platform
LenDenClub, India’s leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, announced that it has raised $10 million in a Series A round co-led from a consortium of investors inclusive of – Tuscan Ventures, Ohm Stock Brokers, Artha Venture Fund, Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Alok Bansal (Co-founder, Policybazaar), Ramakant Sharma (Co-founder, Livspace), Hardik Pandya (Indian Cricketer), Krishna Bhupal (Co-founder of Promaxo and Board member of GVK Power & Infra). The company earlier this year had announced that it was the only player in the P2P lending space in the country to have turned profitable.
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With the current round of funding, LenDenClub valued more than US $51 million, now aims to scale up substantially, eyeing a 5X growth in disbursals in the next 18 months. The company has already disbursed more than 1200 crore worth of loans in this fiscal alone. The fresh capital will be used in aggressive expansion, taking its loan book growth to $1 billion and upscaling the user-base to 10 million from the current 2.5 million by FY 2022-23. Powered by a digital-first approach while offering its customers a smart, speedy, and easy to use, platform, LenDenClub is eyeing to offer a host of financial services as the next frontier transitioning to a digital banking model.
The company aims to invest heavily in innovating and upgrading its proprietary tech-stack platform to aid and upkeep the growth in its customer base whilst supporting all kinds of banking operations conducted on its platform. Additionally, the company aims to enhance its leadership strength and is eyeing strategic C-suite appointments in pursuit of its expansion goals, besides increasing the operational team size by the end of the next fiscal. It is eyeing fresh recruits for the role of tech, product, marketing, and customer service who will aid its growth plans of upscaling its presence across the country.
LenDenClub currently has over 2.5 million borrowers and 1 million investors and has registered loan disbursements worth more than Rs. 2000 crore, of which disbursals worth 1200 crore were achieved in the first 6 months of FY21-22 alone thus reporting growth of 1900%.
Founded in 2016 by Bhavin Patel and Dipesh Karki, LenDenClub leverages technology to bring borrowers and investors on the same platform – providing hassle-free instant loans to borrowers and offering new-age investment options to investors across the country. The company processes over 2.5Lakhs loan applications every month. The company currently has two high growth loan products – InstaMoney for salaried customers and small business loans for merchants and shopkeepers.
Speaking on occasion, Bhavin Patel, Co-founder & CEO, LenDenClub, said, “At LenDenClub we have always emphasised on leveraging technology creatively while adapting to an ever-evolving financial services marketplace. We have been constantly inventing products that yield greater returns for our investors and democratising credit while offering market competitive rates for our borrowers. Futuristic, customer centric-products and seamless digital experience offered by our platform backed by a focused market expansion approach, is what has aided the exponential growth of LenDenClub. We are privileged and delighted to bring on-board immensely diverse investors in this round and use their expertise to fuel further growth at LenDenClub. The aim is to accelerate growth while maintaining profitability on operations.”
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Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner, Artha Venture Fund, said, “We are thrilled to see such a rich trove of investors backing a startup that we have seen grow from 1 to 2 loans a month, to doing 35,000+ loans. We are eager to see where this round of investment takes LenDenClub and the path that it charts for itself.”
LenDenClub had raised $1.5 million as part of its Pre-series A round co-led by Micro VC fund Artha Venture Fund – I, Transworld Group and Ms Shuchi Kothari of the DSP Group in August 2019. The company has built a strong technology platform with this capital and has disbursed loans worth more than Rs. 2,000 crore. The company last year expanded its flagship digital loan platform InstaMoney to pan-India. From its presence in 7 states, the company has expanded the footprint of its key offering to pan-India whereby borrowers from over 19,000 pin-codes can now seamlessly apply and get instant loans. This has helped the section of the population living in tier 3 cities and rural regions not covered by banks especially in the small ticket loan category of up to Rs. 10,000. The company has witnessed 5-8 times growth in their loan disbursals during the last 3 fiscals and has one of the lowest NPA of 3.95%.
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