Canaan Partners Expands its Consumer Digital Media Portfolio With Lending Club

Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners Invest $10.26 Million in Innovative, Person-to-Person Lending Company

MENLO PARK, Calif. – August 23, 2007 - Canaan Partners, a $2.4 billion global venture capital firm, today announced it has jointly led a $10.26 million, Series A investment in Lending Club with Norwest Venture Partners. Lending Club is the rapidly growing, person-to-person lending service where people borrow and lend money among each other, bypassing banks and securing better rates. The new funding will allow Lending Club to expand its person-to-person lending community beyond its initial Facebook® application. Dan Ciporin, a venture partner at Canaan, will join Lending Club’s board of directors.

With its latest investment, Canaan continues to expand its portfolio of digital media investments, particularly companies offering new Web-based services for consumers.  As an early and lead investor in both Match.com and DoubleClick, Canaan has a strong history of success with market disrupting companies revolutionizing the use and delivery of new Internet services.  The firm’s current portfolio includes The Active Network, the leading online community for amateur sports enthusiasts; Blurb, a leader changing the face of publishing by letting anyone easily create and sell bookstore-quality books online; and Associated Content, a leading online publisher known as “The People’s Media Company”.

“The multi-billion dollar consumer lending market is just beginning to leverage the power of social networks,” said Dan Ciporin, a venture partner at Canaan. “Credit card companies have had enormous success over the years using affinity relationships as a platform for lending growth. Lending Club is taking this model to the next level while making it more consumer-friendly: the company uses connections among people to help them lend and borrow money among each other at better rates. With its success on Facebook already demonstrating the power of affinity relationships in consumer lending, we are excited to help Lending Club expand this market disrupting model and increase its business success.”

Lending Club is available to individual borrowers with credit scores at or above 640. Using Lending Club, borrowers can apply for personal loans of $500 to $25,000 to be funded by individual lenders. To date, lenders have funded 80 percent of all loan requests. Lending Club handles user authentication, bank account verification, credit checking, credit reporting, funds transfers and collections.

“Lending Club has demonstrated on Facebook that person-to-person lending can efficiently leverage connections among people. We are now ready to expand beyond Facebook to leverage other types of professional and social connections” said Renaud Laplanche, CEO and founder of Lending Club. “Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners bring a wealth of collective expertise in financial services and digital media that will help the company take person-to-person lending mainstream.”

About Canaan Partners
Canaan Partners invests in visionary entrepreneurs and provides them the networks, insights and operational guidance required to build high-performance technology and healthcare companies. For 20 years, they have taken an active and committed role in the companies in which they invest, and have completed more than 65 mergers and acquisitions and 51 IPOs. With $2.4 billion under management and a worldwide footprint, the firm’s technology team is committed to catalyzing the growth of innovative companies in the digital media, communications & mobility, enterprise and clean tech industries. Among its successes are DoubleClick, the leading online advertising solution, Match.com, the most popular online dating site in the world, and Acme Packet, one of the top ten performing IPOs of 2006. Other Canaan technology investments include SuccessFactors, The Active Network, Blurb, Dexterra, ID Analytics and GroundWorks. Canaan has offices in California, Connecticut, India and Israel.

About Lending Club
Lending Club(TM) is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money among each other, bypass banks and get better rates. Members can borrow money more easily and at a better rate than they would get from a bank, or invest in a pool of loans at higher rates than those served by savings accounts or CDs. A proprietary technology called LendingMatch(TM) helps match lenders and borrowers by using connections established through social networks, associations and online communities, and build diversified portfolios based on lender preferences. Lending Club is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. More information is available at http://www.lendingclub.com.

Contact
Erin McMahon-Lyman
Marketing Alchemist
erin@marketingalchemist.com
Phone (415) 649-1390

Gina Vakili
Canaan Partners
gvakili@canaan.com
Phone (650) 854-8092