China Rapid Finance raises $35M series C to take on China’s white-hot P2P lending market

Chinese online finance and lending company China Rapid Finance has raised a US$35 million series C round, according to a DoNews report. The round was led by Broadline Capital, with UBS Investment Bank and other VC organizations also participating.

China Rapid Finance (CRF) is a P2P consumer lending service that allows users to take out small loans online, or become lenders themselves by loaning out to others. For borrowers, China Rapid Finance promises quick service, and easy options for the remittance of the loan sum and its eventual repayment. For lenders, it offers a tiered system: lend out less than RMB 5000 (US$800) and enjoy a return of 9.9 percent, or lend out higher sums to profit off of higher interest rates.

That’s an appealing enough proposition that the site gets plenty of use: on Wendesday, for example, 26 different users signed up to loan out sums as high as RMB 50,000 (US$8,053).There’s even more interest in borrowing, of course – currently the site claims it’s handling about one transaction every five seconds.

CRF founder Dr. Wang Zhengyu says the company plans to use its new US$35 million cash infusion to expand its lending offerings, and also to increase related services like training for users on how credit history works.

Calling CRF a startup might be a stretch – the company has actually already been working in China’s credit and risk management industry for more than ten years, and it already has partnerships with high-flying partners like Tencent, which it helped develop a mobile lending app. But the Shanghai based company is sure to face competition in the P2P lending space, which is extremely crowded. In just the past two days, for example, we’ve seen FirstP2P.com raise a US$41 million series B and Yooli raise a US$46 million series C. In the past few months, numerous other P2P lenders have also raised funding rounds. CRF’s latest round, while large, will not be enough to separate it from the pack on its own, and the company will be competing with a variety of well-backed P2P finance startups to expand its user base.