Prosper.com gets another $1M for peer-to-peer lending

November 10, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

prosperProsper.com, one of the first websites for peer-to-peer lending, announced today that it has raised another $1 million in funding.

That’s a relatively small amount compared to the $41 million that the San Francisco company has raised in all, but the new money is also noteworthy because it comes from Nigel W. Morris, co-founder of Capital One, a major credit card and banking company. (Prosper shared the investment size with us, even though it’s not in the press release linked above.) Morris made the investment through his firm QED Investors, and is joining Prosper’s board of directors.

Companies like Prosper allow individuals to make loans to each other online. Users post requests for loans of between $1,000 and $25,000, with the maximum interest rate they’re willing to pay, as well as the personal history behind the loan. Then lenders can bid on the loans. As part of efforts for greater financial oversight, federal regulators shut down peer-to-peer lending sites last fall, but Prosper reopened earlier this year, and now says its marketplace has 870,000 loans.

Competitor Lending Club raised $12 million in March, and has raised more than $22 million in all.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • fred93
    Prosper has originated a total of about 30,000 loans, not 870,000 as stated in your article.
  • What are you basing that on? The "870,000 loans in the marketplace" number comes from Prosper.
  • Lender
    Anthony...I guess you forgot to fact check. Fred is right.
  • fred93
    Anthony, you can get the correct statistics from Prosper's web site. Click on "marketplace performance" and then on "view full performance". This will take you to a page which displays many numbers, including the total number of loans. You can specify parameters to limit the page to loans covering only a certain period of time etc, but it defaults to all time. You will see the 30,000 loan number pretty quickly.