Home P2P Lender Zopa Gets $13M Funding – Expands into US

P2P Lender Zopa Gets $13M Funding – Expands into US

One
of the more innovative web apps around has just gotten another
big injection of funds
, and a new CEO to boot. Zopa
describes itself as a “marketplace for Social Lending”, where people
lend and borrow money with each other – sidestepping the middleman, i.e. banks.
They recently advertised
for jobs
in their new America operation (in San Francisco) and celebrated
their second birthday
.

Zopa’s new CEO is the former CEO of San Francisco-based Chela Education
Financing, Douglas H. Dolton. He is understandably bullish on Zopa’s prospects:

“Zopa is the most innovative concept I’ve seen in my 13 years of being
involved in loan businesses […] I expect it to be the fastest-growing
company I’ve ever led, because of its outstanding consumer proposition:
amazing rates on financial products, and a strong, safe person-to-person
connection that promises to change the way U.S. consumers think about
money.”

Well he would say that…. but there’s something about Zopa as a web company
that is very attractive. It is very web-native, definitely innovative, and it
routes around institutions that have enjoyed too much power over ordinary people
for too long – banks! Phillip Riese, Chairman of Zopa, says about the US
expansion:

“Our UK peer-to-peer business is now well-established and growing
rapidly and we are poised to launch in the US, an even larger opportunity for
the company.”

R/WW normally doesn’t cover VC news, but the fact that Zopa is heading into
the US market with an innovative financial web app – is something that caught
our interest. It already has over 135,000 members in the UK (whose average age
is 37 apparently), so it looks poised to make a splash in the US.

Thanks Emre for the pointer. Any of our UK readers used Zopa? If so, we’d
love to hear your opinions of the service.

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