Marketplace Lender Funding Circle Raises $150M

Venture capital continues to be friendly to marketplace lenders.

Small-business lender Funding Circle, which has operations in the United States and the United Kingdom, has received $150 million in new investment. Several funds contributed to the latest round, including DST Global, BlackRock subsidiary fund Baillie Gifford, Sands Capital Venture and Singapore-based investment firm Temasek.

Funding Circle will use the capital for "investing in technology, systems and people," said Sam Hodges, its co-founder and U.S. managing director.

An initial public offering is eventually a possibility, though not in the immediate future, he said. "Perhaps an IPO is something we will do at some point," Hodges said.

Right now "we are very much focused on scaling up" in Funding Circle's current markets Hodges said, adding that the company believes it has the potential for $60 billion of originations. It recently hit the $1 billion mark.

"The U.S. and the U.K. are very much our main focus right now," but ultimately "taking this platform abroad is truly part of the strategy," he said.

"We see lots of areas where we can expand both geographically and in small-business products," Hodges said, adding that 77% of Funding Circle customers say they would go to it for a small-business loan before their banks.

Also on Wednesday, Funding Circle announced a new U.S. chief operating officer, Chitra Nayak, who formerly held the same position with cloud-computing firm Salesforce's platform division, and a new global chief product officer, David Yu, formerly chief executive and technology officer for online sportsbook and exchange Betfair.

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