Due to the popularity of the Lending Club photo contest, we have decided to extend the entry deadline to May 31, 2010 to give many others the chance to submit their great photos.  With 180+ photos submitted so far, we are thrilled to see such great images like this one or this one, but also a bit puzzled by some submissions like this one, this one or this one.  Yes, folks, puppies, babies and... (female pugilists?!?!) are cute, but what do they have to do with Lending Club? Not quite sure.

To give you a sense for what we are looking for, here is the latest photograph selected as our background image, courtesy of Mundy Cruising.

Well, what are you waiting for?  Send us your best shots!

Our friends at Foundation Capital invested quite a bit of money in our company this morning, and were joined by existing investors Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners.

Besides bringing our team the pleasant feeling of waking up with an extra $24.5M in our bank account, the additional resources will be helpful in many ways. This investment will help us complete new projects faster, including new loan products for borrowers, new investment tools for investors, a series of improvements to our website (including performance improvements, thank you for your patience) and other enhancements that will continue to make your Lending Club experience increasingly more rewarding. The funds will also help us expand our reach to a larger pool of customers and continue growing our community.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our shareholders for their enthusiastic support, and thank you our members who have grown the Lending Club community at an incredibly fast pace over the last 12 months, increasing our monthly loan volume from $2.3M in February 2009 to $8.6M in March 2010 to capture 79% of the US peer lending market last month.

So the day started quite well here. How’s your day going? Leave us a comment.

Best, Renaud

Nearly 100 Lending Club investors attended our WebCast this week to learn more about investing in Lending Club Notes and get smarter about P2P investing in general. We believe they may have found a better place to stash their cash. Patrick Gannon, SVP Investor Services, and I, Sam Kasle shared tips on how to maximize your return, properly diversify, and how streamline your investment process. Rob Garcia, our Sr Director of Product Strategy, moderated a lively Q&A session where we addressed many investor questions such as how Lending Club handles collections, statistics around defaults, and details on our PRIME and IRA offerings. Lending Club notes are offer by prospectus filed with the SEC.

Smart about investing, but want to Get Smarter? Check out the replay of the forum here.

We also have more great WebCasts and events in the works.  Go to our events page for latest schedule and reserve your spot in advance.

Sam Kasle

Lending Club is hosting our 4th twitter contest, and this time we'll have the most winners ever.

How to enter and win

Tweet daily about Lending Club's Photo Contest during the month of April, and we will select a winner (randomly) each and every day!

Prizes, prizes, prizes

You'll have your choice of prize: pick some of the classic Lending Club garb in black and orange (t-shirts, messenger bags, drawstring sport sacks, caps, etc) or treat yourself to one of our newly branded tees in 4 fab colors pictured here.

What to tweet

When tweeting, make sure you include a link to this post or to our contest page, as well as the hashtag #LCPhoto to make it easy for us to count you in.

Sample tweets:

Enter Lending Club Photo Contest or RT tweet 2 win http://ow.ly/1w2Tj #LCPhoto

Enter Lending Club Photo Contest: $2,500+ in prizes http://ow.ly/1w2Tj #LCPhoto RT tweet 2 win

Lending Club's April Tweeter Contest http://ow.ly/1w5uf Follow @LendingClub and RT to win #LCPhoto

... or just tweet your thoughts about Lending Club (just include a link and hashtag). Winners announced daily via @LendingClub's twitter page around 10:00am PT.

Tweet abundantly.  Good luck!

@RobGarciaSJ

Yesterday, Lending Club broke the $100mm mark in issued loans with a record high $8,664,750 in consumer loans issued in March alone.  This number represents over 79% of the $10,926,846 in peer-to-peer loans issued in the US in March.

Creditworthy borrowers are increasingly turning to Lending Club for better rates, as an alternative to traditional lending institutions.

Investors looking for a better return have continued to stash their cash in Lending Club Notes and earn over 9.5% net annualized returns (from June 2007 to March 2010).

To celebrate this milestone, we did some research to show you how big $100mm is.

Leave us a comment!  If you had $100mm, what would you do with it?

The Lending Club team