Lending Works scoops £2.8m fundraise

The consumer lending peer-to-peer platform has lent £115m to date.

Consumer lending firm Lending Works has raised £2.8m in a round led by UK-based private equity house Maven Capital Partners. Maven contributed £2m, with a further £800,000 coming courtesy of Pollen Street Capital and NVM Private Equity.

The latest fundraise is smaller than the company’s seed and series A rounds – £3m and £3.5m respectively – according to Crunchbase.

Lending Works has long held the role of ‘the next’ P2P consumer lender behind market leaders Zopa and RateSetter. It has lent a grand total £115m to date, with more than a quarter (£32m) coming in the first half of this year.

All proceeds from the fundraise will go towards funding further growth, primarily through investment in sales and marketing and in the company’s partnership channels – which will include ‘loan customer acquisition via other businesses’.

Lending Works signed a landmark partnership with banking challenger Revolut in March 2017, offering instant credit to its customers – which now number more than a million in the UK alone. Lending Works co-founder and CEO Nick Harding has previously suggested that ‘B2B’ origination partnerships of this kind will become increasingly important for the platform.  

Melanie Goward, investment director at Maven, said in a statement: “We are delighted to lead the investment in Lending Works, which has grown to become one of the leading P2P lenders in the UK. The firm has developed a reputation in the market of being a responsible and ethical P2P market leader, which is evidenced by it being the first major platform to have been fully authorised by the FCA and the first to have negotiated insurance cover which provides lenders with protection against borrower defaults. The experienced management team, assembled and led by Nick and Matt, has a clear and executable strategy and we look forward to helping them deliver this in the coming years.”