AI-Powered Business Loan Marketplace, Lending Express, Secures $2.7 Million in Seed Financing

Lending Express, the only AI-powered marketplace for business loans, today announced the securing of a $2.7 million investment round led by Entrée Capital, iAngels, and existing investors. The funds will be used to build out their innovative loan-matching technology and scale up operations in the United States and Australia.

Lending Express’ technology matches businesses with the most relevant lenders and provides a fast, simple funding solution at no cost. Through their proprietary AI-powered AlgoScore™ and MatchScore™ algorithms they are able to predict the likelihood of a potential business to be funded and match the most relevant SMBs with the right lender, financial solution, and terms, providing lenders with the most qualified customers and thus increasing conversion rates from application to loan. This creates a win-win for businesses and lenders. This funding round comes on the heels of an immense growth period – over the past 12 months, Lending Express has increased total number of loans matched six-fold, connected SMBs to $44.8M in funding since operations began in 2016 Q4, and expects to quadruple their amount of US funding in three quarters from $1.3M to $5.2M, demonstrating strong and consistently increasing demand.

Figure 1: Quarterly growth by number of matched loans in USA and Australia: In 2018 Q1, Lending Express has generated 567 loan matches in Australia – over half of what they generated across all of 2017 – and has doubled the number of loans they matched in the USA in 2017.

“The online alternative finance market is expanding at an incredibly rapid rate, and yet until  now, has remained shamefully archaic and rudimentary,” said Eden Amirav, CEO and co-founder of Lending Express. “Charting a new path for SMBs to access loans, our proprietary technology not only matches SMBs with their ideal lenders at an unprecedented success rate, but also does so painlessly. As we expand, we look forward to supporting the ever-growing SMB sector, in the US and Australia, and beyond.”

Figure 2: Quarterly growth by USD amount of loans matched in US and Australia: 2017 Australian funding totaled at over $19.2M, which Lending Express expects to surpass by end of 2018 – Q2, leading to a total of $44M loans matched in Australia. US loans matched in first two quarters of operation totaled $4.7M.

“The Lending Express team has built a fantastic product,” said Eyal Lifshitz, CEO of online SMB lender Bluevine. “Their mission is perfectly aligned with our own goal of providing small businesses access to capital when they need it most – with speed, simplicity, and transparency. Lending Express helps makes our job that much easier by ensuring that we are meeting businesses we can help.”

“We are proud to be leading this funding round for Lending Express, having proven their model in Australia to become the market leader within a matter of months,” commented Mor Assia of iAngels. “Looking at the industry, it is clear that this innovative approach is the future. We are excited for the opportunity to play a part in bringing about the next big trend in loan lending, and have full confidence Lending Express will become a leader in the market.”