Funding Circle will be expanding ints online lending platform into Europe with its acquisition of Zencap, a German lender with a foothold in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
Speigel Online, who broke the story, says just 520 loans have been made over the Zencap platform, worth €35 million (£25.6 million, $39.6 million). Zencap had been identified as the fastest growing online lender in Europe and had received international attention when Victory Park Capital, a lender to online lenders, announced that it would open a €230 million lending facility to access loans on the Zencap platform.
Funding Circle, based in the UK, has demonstrated a willingness to internationalize its peer to peer small business lending platform. It first entered the US market via an acquisition of Endurance Lending in October 2013. Now, with Zencap as part of its international portfolio, Funding Circle is turning its attention to European expansion.
According to Business Insider, Funding Circle intends to do more acquisitions like Zencap to ramp its growth;
It’s been a lot better than we expected to be honest,” Desai tells Business Insider of the US expansion. If you look at it 2 years ago, when Funding Circle came together with Endurance, the old Endurance business was probably doing about $300,000 (£196,200) a month in new lending. If you look at it now, we’re doing around $30 million (£19.6 million) a month in the US. It’s 100 times as big in 2 years. And that’s 30% of our business now, the US. –Funding Circle CEO, Samir Desai
Funding Circle’s own most recent financing round closed in April 2015, raising $150M as part of a Series E round, in which BlackRock, DST, and Temasek participated. Funding Circle has raised nearly $300M in total and is reportedly valued at over $1 billion, a large startup for the UK fintech ecosystem.
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