Online payday loan provider LendUp raises $150M Series B, launches its own credit card and a companion app that can be used to halt or monitor purchases
LendUp Scores $150M For A Credit Card That Won't Screw You Over — Banks are so greedy that LendUp can undercut them, help people avoid debt …
Context & Ripple Effects
This $150M Series B is the founding bet of LendUp's pivot from online payday loans into branded consumer credit: a card pitched as the anti-bank product for borrowers traditional issuers price out, plus a companion app that lets users freeze or track purchases in real time. The pitch — that banks are greedy enough to be undercut on their own turf — set the template for everything that followed.
The record since is a cautionary arc: within months came an $6.3M refunds-and-penalties order for deceptive practices, then a CFPB directive shutting down LendUp's lending operations outright after repeated findings that it lied to and cheated customers. The card business this round launched is what survived the split.
First-order effects
- Subprime borrowers gain a no-fee credit card with built-in spending controls, directly attacking the overdraft and late-fee revenue that mainstream issuers earn from exactly this customer base.
- LendUp converts payday-loan credibility into a two-product company overnight, with $150M to fund the card rollout and the companion app.
Second-order effects
- Investor appetite validated fast: by August LendUp raised another $48M at a reported $500M valuation specifically for the subprime card push ([[a:873412]]), while Upstart's Series D showed AI-underwritten lending drawing parallel capital.
- Incumbent card issuers face a competitor whose stated edge is fee elimination — forcing the question of whether fee income on thin-file customers is defensible against app-first challengers.
Third-order effects
- The endgame — splitting lending from cards, then regulators ordering the lending side shut for cheating customers — shows that 'fairer' subprime fintech still lives or dies on compliance, not UX.
- If the pattern holds, subprime credit consolidates around whichever platforms can pass regulatory scrutiny, with enforcement actions acting as the real moat between survivors and shutdowns.
The trend: Venture-backed fintechs spent the 2010s rebranding payday-style lending as consumer-friendly credit cards, with regulatory enforcement — not fundraising — determining which of those brands survived.