SUNNYVALE, CA – August 23, 2007 - Lending Club, the rapidly growing person-to-person lending service where people borrow and lend money among each other, bypass the banks, and get better rates, today announced that it received $10.26 million in Series A funding led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Lending Club will use the funds to expand its person-to-person lending community beyond its initial Facebook® application.

"Lending Club has enjoyed significant early success with the Facebook launch in May, and we see great opportunity for the company to leverage its affinity focus," said Jeff Crowe, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who will be joining Lending Club’s board. "Consumers borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every year at high interest rates, and the person-to-person lending market has tremendous potential. With its focus on quality-lending relationships, Lending Club is well positioned to be a leader in this space."

Since its May 24, 2007, launch on Facebook, the Lending Club community has reached more than 13,000 Facebook users and $750,000 in loans have been transacted among those users.

"The multi-billion dollar consumer lending market is just beginning to leverage the power of social networks," said Dan Ciporin, a venture partner at Canaan, who will also be joining Lending Club’s board. "Credit card companies have had enormous success over the years using affinity relationships as a platform for lending growth. Lending Club is taking this model to the next level while making it more consumer-friendly: the company uses connections among people to help them lend and borrow money among each other at better rates. With its success on Facebook already demonstrating the power of affinity relationships in consumer lending, we are excited to help Lending Club expand this market disrupting model and increase its business success."

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by individual lenders. To date lenders have funded 80 percent of all loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

Lending Club's proprietary technology, LendingMatch, helps lenders quickly identify the best loans based on pre-set criteria such as credit worthiness, being friends on Facebook, sharing network affiliations, belonging to the same groups or by geographical location. LendingMatch instantly presents lenders with a diversified loan portfolio (composed of ten to thirty borrowers) reflecting these relationships as well as the lenders' individual risk preferences.

"Lending Club has demonstrated on Facebook that person-to-person lending can efficiently leverage connections among people. We are now ready to expand beyond Facebook to leverage other types of professional and social connections," said Renaud Laplanche, CEO and founder of Lending Club. "Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners bring a wealth of collective expertise in financial services and digital media that will help the company take P2P lending mainstream."

Prior to Norwest, Jeff served as President, COO and board member of DoveBid, Inc., a privately held business auction firm, which expanded during his tenure via internal growth and acquisition from a $10M revenue run rate to a $120M revenue run rate with 400 employees. From 1990 to 1999, Jeff was co-founder, President, CEO and Board member of Edify Corporation, a venture backed enterprise software company focused on voice and internet e-commerce platforms and applications. Edify held its IPO in 1996 and was sold to S1 Corporation in 1999.

1. Jeff, how do you think p2p lending will change the face of consumer lending?

Person-to-person (p2p) lending will be an important driver of change in the world of consumer lending, because the economic model of p2p lending is significantly more efficient than the traditional business models of banks, credit card companies and other institutional lenders. That improved efficiency enables better interest rates for both individual borrowers and individual lenders when they participate in a p2p lending transaction. So as awareness grows among consumers that they can both borrow and lend at more attractive rates, we believe that demand to participate in a p2p lending platform such as Lending Club will explode. Today, the overall markets for consumer lending in the U.S. are enormous, so p2p lending has tremendous room to grow from its current small base before it will seriously impact the operations of large consumer lenders. But you can be sure that banks, credit card companies and other consumer finance companies will be paying very close attention to the growth of the p2p lending category -- they know that they will have to deal with p2p lending more and more as time goes by.

2. Are you a lender or a borrower in Lending Club?

I am a lender on Lending Club. It was a very straightforward and easy experience over the internet. I registered as a lender on Lending Club via Facebook, entered a total amount that I wanted to lend, and decided on an overall risk profile for my loans. Then Lending Club's software automatically generated a potential portfolio of roughly 20 loans and suggested amounts for me to fund for each loan. I had the opportunity to look at each borrower's profile, including their job, income, debt level, credit history and reason for borrowing. From the suggested loan portfolio, I picked out the loans that I wanted to fund, adjusted the amounts that I wanted to fund or stayed with the suggested funding levels, and hit the submit button. It was as simple as that. Lending Club then automatically deducted the funds from my account and set up my account to automatically receive the loan repayments from the borrowers. My current portfolio is yielding over 13% -- a lot better than money market funds.

3. Did the Lending Club deal ruin your summer vacation?

Norwest Venture Partners was very excited to invest in Lending Club, and we wanted to make sure that we kept the investment decision making and due diligence process moving forward in a timely fashion over the course of the summer. I had a long scheduled summer vacation that landed right in the middle of our investment process, but we had to keep going on closing the investment, vacation or not. This meant daily phone calls and emails from our vacation spot. I would not say that it quite ruined the vacation, but I can say that everyone in my extended family now knows Renaud!

Prior to joining Canaan Partners, Dan Ciporin was CEO of Shopping.com, where he oversaw the company's growth from zero to over $100 million in revenues in just 5 years, culminating in the company's initial public offering in October 2004. Shopping.com was the third largest ecommerce site on the web before it was acquired by eBay in August of 2005.

1. Dan, what prompted you to invest in Lending Club?

The consumer credit market is an absolutely gigantic market and yet paradoxically one of the few sectors that has not yet been completely upended by the internet. I think the Lending Club approach to consumer lending is not only a great disintermediation approach in a large, established market sector but also through the focus on affinity relationships takes what has been proven to work on the web and applies it uniquely to the lending marketplace.

2. What makes the person-to-person lending space attractive from your point of view?

P2P services and functionality in general has been at the heart of web market disruption, from Ebay to MySpace to Facebook, using only a few of the most prominent examples. I think the opportunity is ripe now to apply P2P functionality in the consumer lending space, especially with the particular focus on pre-existing affiliations that Lending Club has.

3. Tell us more about your background and how it is relevant to Lending Club.

Prior to my experience as CEO of Shopping.com, which we viewed not only as a price comparison service but more importantly a complete facilitation mechanism for the entire purchasing process, I was a senior vice president at MasterCard International. Working in the "traditional" consumer credit market was a first-hand opportunity to view the enormity of influence this market has throughout the economy, and how important even relatively simple product innovations can be in building and maintaining a customer base.

More directly relevant to Lending Club, one of the innovations we worked on at MasterCard was in helping to develop the affinity/co-branded market for credit cards, an effort that ultimately proved to be a huge success for us. I have seen how effective affinity relationships can be in 'traditional' consumer lending, and I think that Lending Club can take this same kind of innovative approach in the massive consumer credit market with even more compelling results.

As reported earlier yesterday afternoon, we are thrilled to announce that Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners invested in the Company as part of a total $10.26MM investment round. Jeff Crowe from NVP and Dan Ciporin from Canaan Partners are joining the Company’s board of directors.

We launched the company as part of the Facebook F8 platform on May 24 and since then have issued $750,000 in loans among Facebook users. Launching on Facebook made sense: we believe that person-to-person lending will grow faster in an environment where people feel connected to each other, and Facebook offers the perfect environment for this with friends, groups and networks. Facebook Lenders can build a “portfolio” of loans based not only on credit profiles but also based on their connections to the borrowers (attended the same school, worked for the same company, etc.).

Facebook now has over 6 million active user groups which are prime targets for financial services. However, Facebook users are younger than the average online population, and our strict screening criteria (640 minimum credit score, less than 20% DTI) led us to decline about 75% of all applications, as younger borrowers tend to have a lower FICO score. We are coming up with new tools to help the “declined” borrowers understand the importance of good credit and take specific actions to improve their credit score.

We will be using the funds to expand beyond our current Facebook application. Stay tuned for interviews with Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin on this blog later this morning.

I lived in New York City for much of my life and one of our infamous mayors, named Ed Koch, used to walk around the city saying “How am I doing?” It was a great way to get feedback then, and I think it still is now. So, how are we doing? Let us know.

There are many ways to measure how we are doing. We have had previous posts on new features, new state licenses, credit policy, volume of loans, and many other topics. This post is about interest rates. We have issued more than $750,000 in loans at an average interest rate of 11%. That is a great rate at which to borrow money, as well as to lend money.

• Our average loan size continues to increase and is currently $5,586. Loan size tends to be higher at lower credit grades, possibly reflecting the need to consolidate debt. The F credit grade carries the highest average loan size of over $9,000.

• Over half of our loans carry an interest rate of 10% or below, with over 25% of all loans carrying an interest rate of 8% or less. These are great interest rates for borrowers when you consider that the average credit card (with a balance) carries an interest rate of about 15%.

• While half of the loans are issued at an interest rate of 10% or below, you can see from the distribution of rates below that our lenders have funded loans across all credit grades. Our lowest interest loan to date was issued to a New Yorker at an interest rate of 7.12% and the highest interest loan was issued to a resident of Georgia at 17.54%. We have issued loans in 22 states with Florida, New York and Massachusetts leading the pack.

So, how are we doing? We would love to hear from you.

Better rates. Together.

John Donovan