Kabbage is branching out from the merchants in search of working capital where it built its original business and is now looking to individuals looking for personal loads.
The new service for those potential consumers is Karrot, and the will toss the Atlanta-based start-up into the increasingly crowded world of P2P personal lending. This ground is currently staked out by players such as Lending Club and Prosper Marketplace.
Karrot is only open to U.S. customers and caps its loans at $35,000. Repayment terms are generall 3-5 years. The off-shoot company boasts speed as its greatest assets and claims it can take a user from application to approval within minutes. That speed comes from running on a similar big-data analytics platform as its big brother Kabbage. Kabbage combines data sources, including Facebook, to identify a business’ ability to repay, Karrot’s modification on that will streamline the process to gain insight into a an applicants cashflow and income.
“We will continue to innovate beyond today’s announcement, delivering real and robust technology solutions to the financial services industry.” said Kabbage’s co-founder and CEORob Frohwein told Finextra.