P2P lending service Prosper Marketplace raises around $165M led by Credit Suisse, doubling valuation to $1.9B
Gillian Tan / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
In April 2015, marketplace lending was drawing balance-sheet money from the banks it once threatened to disintermediate: Credit Suisse led Prosper Marketplace's $165M raise that doubled its valuation to $1.9B, and two weeks later UK rival Funding Circle closed a $150M DST-led round above $1B. Bank-led capital was the sector's validation moment.
The arc since then has been a deflation: within two years Prosper was reportedly in talks to sell roughly a 10% stake at $550M — under a third of its 2015 mark — while pivoting via the BillGuard acquisition into consumer financial tools and cutting staff amid shrinking loan volume. This raise is the peak of the cycle the rest of the coverage measures against.
First-order effects
- Credit Suisse converts from analyst and observer of P2P lending into Prosper's lead investor, giving the platform bank-grade endorsement and roughly $165M to fund originations.
- Prosper's valuation doubles to $1.9B, resetting the benchmark every subsequent round and exit in US consumer P2P would be priced against.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms raced to match the bank-led template — Funding Circle's $150M DST-led round at a $1B+ valuation landed weeks later, and Zopa raised its Series E toward a bank charter rather than pure marketplace scale.
- Prosper deployed the capital into product breadth, acquiring personal finance tracker BillGuard for $30M+ months after the raise.
Third-order effects
- The 2017 talks to raise $50M at $550M show the structural risk of marketplace lenders funded at bank-comparable valuations: when loan volume contracts — Prosper's dropped 12% quarter-to-quarter — the model reprices hard rather than gradually.
- If the pattern holds, standalone P2P platforms converge back toward regulated-bank structures (Zopa's charter push) or get absorbed as origination channels for the very institutions they undercut.
The trend: Marketplace lending's 2015 peak of bank-led mega-rounds inverted into a repricing cycle where P2P platforms either adopt banking charters or shrink to niche originators — Prosper's $1.9B-to-$550M swing is the clearest data point.