This article is a part of a series on P2P Lending:

1. P2P Lending Overview

2. P2P Borrowers

3. P2P Lenders

4. P2P Lender Profile: Prosper

5. P2P Lender Profile: Zopa


Prosper launched in September 2006 and is based in San Francisco. The P2P lender has 200,000 members and has funded over $40 million in loans.

Prosper features developer tools to allow other companies to build on their lending platform. They invite its use for academic research, investment analysis, and even start-ups. An API is provided as a WSDL based web-service for ad-hoc querying of the Prosper Marketplace. Proper also provides Data Export for a complete snapshot of all listings, bids, user profiles, groups and loans ever created on Prosper

Prosper collects a one-time 1% or 2% fee on funded loans from borrowers and a 0.5% or 1.0% annual loan servicing fee from lenders.

CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen was the CEO and Founder of E-LOAN. Prosper has raised $20 million from Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures, and Omidyar Network.