The U.S. online lending platform market just got a bit bigger with the addition of a startup called Blackmoon from Russia.
The company has a presence in Russia, Poland, Latvia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia and Finland. Now, it will expand that footprint into the U.S. with an office in New York City in oder to work with U.S. lenders.
This expansion follows $1 million in seed funding raised from its two founders, Ilya Perekopsky and CEO Oleg Seydak, along with VC fund Flint Capital. It’s also planning on raising more funds to help fund its U.S. expansion plans. Blackmoon joins the industry as the online lending marketplace has hit a bit of rough patch. This includes the Lending Club saga that’s caused the exit of a CEO (still being investigated) and a company struggling to regain its reputation amid speculation that the company’s value was inflated.
What Blackmoon believes it can bring to the crowded market, however, is its composite model.
“The volume of loans generated by balance-sheet lenders is an order of magnitude greater than the loan volumes generated by traditional marketplace lenders, such as Lending Club and Prosper,” Perekopsky told VentureBeat in an interview. “Blackmoon provides a technology solution that enables balance-sheet lenders to distribute their loans to investors; for investors, Blackmoon is providing access to an asset class that was previously unavailable to them.”
This also includes looking at technology in the market differently.
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“We refer to the technology platform we are providing as ‘Marketplace Lending as a Service.’ At its core, MPLaaS is integrated with balance-sheet lenders’ existing infrastructure, which provides balance-sheet lenders with access to investors that are seeking to invest in such loans. Such an approach provides them with a unique set of advantages: the flexibility and profitability of a balance-sheet lender on top of the scalability and stability of a marketplace,” Perekopsky added.
