Venture Catalysts backs peer-to-peer lending startup LenDen

Online peer-to-peer lending startup LenDen Club has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from seed investment innovation platform Venture Catalysts.

Those who participated in this round include angel investors Anirudh Damani, Daud Ali, Narendra Karnavat, Vikas Kapoor, Vikram Lakhotia, Krishna Jhunjhunwala and Jayesh Shah.

The funds will be used for enhancing the platform, technology development and creating an end-to-end lending process.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of India announced that it will seek public comments to regulate the peer-to-peer lending business. "Based on the feedback, the contours of regulating P2P lending will be decided in consultation with the SEBI," it had said, referring to the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India.

A number of startups, connecting individual borrowers or small businesses with lenders via a digital platform, have come up in the last few months. In the peer-to-peer lending space, LoanZen Pvt Ltd raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from angel investors in February through Tracxn Syndicate, an angel network launched by Tracxn.

The same month, Wiseworks Technology Pvt Ltd, which runs digital lending platform Capzest, raised $200,000 in a seed funding round led by Lion Ventures. Online lending marketplace KountMoney raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding in November 2015. Loanbaba raised $320,000 in seed funding the same month. IndiaLends, an online marketplace that connects lenders and borrowers for unsecured loans, raised $1 million in October last year. Also in October, P2P lending marketplace Faircent received an undisclosed amount of investment from Aarin Capital Partners.

LenDen Club, run by Innofin Solutions Pvt Ltd, was founded by Dipesh Karki and Bhavin Patel in 2014 to connect salaried borrowers with individual lenders. It is currently operating as a web-based platform, and claims to have arranged more than 150 loans till date.

"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," said Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, co-founder of Venture Catalysts.

Venture Catalysts recently added 50 new angel investors to its network even as it plans to expand its investor base to 800-1000 members. It is also building a corpus of Rs 100 crore to provide early-stage investment support to promising ventures.

In Janaury, train ticket discovery platform ConfirmTKT received funding of $250,000 from Venture Catalysts. The same month photography curation startup SIFTR Labs also secured $150,000 from Venture Catalysts. The network has also funded analytics startup vPhrase.