Chinese P2P lending service Ppdai recently announced that it has raised millions of dollars in Series B financing led by LightSpeed China Partners, Noah Private Wealth Management and existing investor Sequoia Capital. The company has received $25 million of Series A funding from Sequoia Capital in last December. The capital raised this time will be used in the credit system and team construction.
Ppdai was founded in 2007 and claimed to be the first P2P lending platform in China. A differentiator of Ppdai from its rivals is that it focused squarely on online lending rather than integrating online and offline lending services like Renrendai, etc. The inflow and outflow of the capital are all completed online. Its target customers are individuals and small- and medium-sized enterprises.
According to Zhang Jun, CEO of the company, the primary problems for P2P lending platforms are risk control and credit system construction. In the past seven years, Ppdai has collected large chunks of data, based on which the company can help customers to prevent the financial risks, said Zhang. He added that the platform’s default rate is less than 1.5% and bad debt rate is 1.52%.
LightSpeed China Partners is also the investor of several other online financial companies, including 360Rong, BTC China and 99Bill. The venture capital company said it invested in Ppdai because the online platform is more effective in attracting funds and has access to grassroots users.
image credit: Ppdai
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