LenDenClub, a peer-to-peer money lending platform, has raised $1 million (approx ₹71 crore) in a pre-Series A funding round, which was led by Artha Venture Fund. Investors such as Transworld Group, Shuchi Kothari, Ramakant Sharma, Narendra Karnavat, and Nandi Mehta, also participated in the round.
The platform, based out of Mumbai, will utilize the invested funds to expand its senior management team, develop innovative lending products, and expanding its geographical reach to 12 states.
Bhavin Patel, cofounder and CEO, LenDenClub said, “The current funding round gives us the ability to double our reach and continue our quest in finding creditworthy borrowers that are not being serviced by the current financial institutions.”
He also said that the company aims to double the number of lenders on the platform to reach ₹500 crore disbursal in the next 18 months.
LenDen Club was founded in 2014 by Dipesh Karki and Bhavin Patel. The platform connects salaried borrowers to individual lenders which uses a combination of traditional and non-traditional data points to validate credit-worthiness of borrowers.
The company claims to offer 150 loans/day and it attributes the growth to its InstaMoney platform, whcih provides small-ticket loans disbursed into the bank accounts of salaried individuals within 24 hours.
Anirudh A Damani, managing partner at Artha Venture Fund, said, “Their spectacular growth in lender registrations and money disbursed is even more heartening at a time wherein the entire lending ecosystem is petitioning the government for a bailout.”
While, other pieces of information about the fintech platform tells that the company leverages its proprietary tech-stack to reduce the time taken to underwrite a loan.
And the only loan applications would get loans that meet the minimum preset qualification criteria, which gets approved within 5 minutes and those that are rejected are underwritten by a back-end team with a 2-hour turnaround on the lending decision.
The approved borrower profiles go live on a special lender app where over 10,000 active lenders choose whom they want to lend.
The funds from the lender’s account are auto invested if the borrower’s profile meets the criteria set by the lender.
According to the company, it is serviceable in six states and claims to have over 500,000 individuals registered on the platform. It claims to have disbursed over 50,000 P2P loans and managing a loan book of ₹60 crore.
Apart form LenDen Club, other fintech lending platform in the industry constitute of Faircent, I-lend, Lendingkart, Capital Float, Lendbox, Paytm Payments Bank, among more.