Consumer loans marketplace Avant raises $325M in new equity funding, led by General Atlantic with J.P. Morgan investing, at a valuation of about $2B
Context & Ripple Effects
This September 2015 round put Avant at roughly a $2 billion valuation with General Atlantic leading and J.P. Morgan buying in — one of the largest equity checks of the online consumer lending wave, arriving just as marketplace lenders were courting bank money to fund originations.
The arc that follows is instructive: within eight months Avant cut nearly 60 staff, about 7% of its workforce, and shelved both a credit card and its Australia expansion. By 2020 the company had spun out its bank-software arm as Amount, which raised an $81M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Growth — the technology outliving the lending-growth story.
First-order effects
- Avant gains $325M to scale consumer loan originations at a time when its model depended on fresh capital to keep issuing credit, and J.P. Morgan's participation gives it an institutional-bank endorsement few marketplace lenders had.
Second-order effects
- Bank investors like J.P. Morgan blur the line between marketplace lender and balance-sheet lender — their capital makes rivals compete partly on who can secure institutional backing rather than purely on underwriting or rates.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the corpus: growth-stage consumer lenders over-expanded against demand, then the durable asset proved to be the lending software itself — Amount's Goldman-led raise after the Avant spinoff points to platforms repositioning as vendors to banks rather than competing lenders.
The trend: Online consumer lending platforms raised peak equity rounds around 2015, then retrenched into bank-facing software businesses once origination growth stalled.