LendingRobot Levels the Field for Retail Investors

It is well known that around 80% of the investors in Lending Club and Prosper are institutional. These players are obviously hugely sophisticated and expend a lot of time and capital investing on these platforms. This can put the retail investors at a huge disadvantage if they also want to enjoy the benefits that investing in peer-to-peer loans can bring.

a couple of men sitting at a table in a bowling alley

LendingRobot is a platform that aims to address this inbalace. It has the potential to allow retail investors compete on the same level as institutions.

The company was originally started in 2012 to meet the needs of its two founders, Emmanuel Marot and Gilad Golan, who were looking for a way to automate their investments in peer-to-peer loans. They found that loan selection required a sophisticated and time consuming process to ensure the loans fit their investment criteria. The lack of liquidity also makes things difficult for short term investors.

LendingRobot has now announced that it has raised $3 million in a Series A round by Runa Capital. It will use this funding to improve its service and accelerate growth.

Currently LendingRobot has over 1000 customers, who have deployed around $15 million in assets. The company uses high speed automation software and machine learning algorithms to help investors select and invest in loans less than one second after they become available on peer-to-peer lending sites. LendingRobot supports more than 40 different filtering criteria for Lending Club and Prosper.

With this funding LendingRobot aims to continue to make it easy for investors to access the online lending markets, it will also improve the performance of its artificial intelligence algorithms and it will bring a unique solution to improve liquidity in online lending.

Emmanuel Marot, CEO of LendingRobot, commented:

"LendingRobot is a perfect example of the future of finance: fully automated, sophisticated, and affordable. Many traditional institutions will be made obsolete by Internet-based services. We already help many individuals to invest in online lending, but now LendingRobot will go much further, we plan to bring an unprecedented level of simplicity, flexibility and liquidity to online lending."

Peter Bauert, partner at Runa Capital, added:

“LendingRobot is a solid technology able to reshape the lending landscape. With LendingRobot individual investors can significantly improve investment experience and we are happy to support LendingRobot’s efforts to democratize finance.”