Nitin Konde
12 April, 2016, New Delhi: India’s seed Investment & innovation platform, Venture Catalyst has recently invested seed funding in a premium peer-to-peer lending platform, LenDen Club. Some of the veteran investors from VCats, including the likes of Anirudh Damani, Daud Ali, Narendra Karnavat, Vikas kapoor, Vikram lakhotia, Krishna Jhunjhunwaala and Jayesh Shah participated in the funding.
Founded by Dipesh and Bhavin in 2014, LenDen Club is a Fin-Tech startup connecting salaried borrowers to individual lenders. Currently operating as a web-based platform, LenDen Club considers a combination of traditional and non-traditional data points to validate the credit-worthiness of the lender. Having arranged more than 150 loans till date, the founders plan to utilize the seed funds into further enhancing the platform and ultimately create an end-to-end online lending process.
Anirudh Damani, angel investor at Venture Catalyst had another point to add about the announcement, “Unstructured P2P lending has been going on for centuries and while the world has moved on to structured P2P lending, the space is at a nascent stage in India but the demand for such a platform is quite high. Which is why LenDen club has solid prospects as it concentrates on creating a good supply of borrowers for yield/return hungry (small or large) investors who are flush with liquidity. We are excited to invest in LenDen and will follow-on in later rounds.”
Commenting further on the recent development, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder, Venture Catalyst, said, “Peer-to-peer lending is a disruptive concept in itself, especially in regards to the present day economy. We further have complete faith in the founding team, and believe in their potential to create an excellent product, given the right amount of assistance and mentoring. ”
Echoing the same thought, Narendra Karnavat, angel investor at Venture Catalysts observed, “There is a lot of scope for peer to peer lending platform in India. This web based platform for lending business offers good opportunity for growth. Since there are a lot of regulatory & RBI hurdles in this industry, it is considered to be high risk -return investment. To eliminate the risk associated in this segment, there has to be proper solutions in place to keep the regulatory hurdles out.”
The seed investment will enable LenDen Club to further enhance its disruptive technology and emerge as the leader in the peer-to-peer lending segment. Sharing furthermore on securing funding, a visibly excited Bhavin Patel, Co-Founder & CEO, LenDen Club, said “We wanted to bring traditional lending on digital platform. Securing seed funding at such a nascent stage gives us the boost we have been looking for. This will allow us to further improve the platform and reach out to more users. Eventually, we hope to become one of the most widely accessed peer-to-peer lending platforms.”
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