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Lending Club, the online market that connects borrowers looking for loans with individuals with the money to fund them, has acquired Springstone Financial for about $140 million in cash and stock, the company said this morning.
To help make the deal happen, Lending Club has raised $50 million in debt financing and $65 million in a new equity round from funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price, BlackRock and others. Combined, the entirety of the newly secured $115 million was used as the cash component of the acquisition. Springstone received the rest, valued at about $25 million, in Lending Club stock.
Springstone provides loans and payment plans to individuals seeking elective medical treatments and parents looking for help paying for their children’s private educations.
“Parents looking to finance their children’s education and patients undergoing elective procedures will now have access to Lending Club loans and benefit from responsible, transparent and affordable financing options,” CEO Renaud Laplanche said in a statement.
Over the last year, Lending Club has diversified its offerings in other ways. The company started allowing institutions, such as banks, to invest in Lending Club loans. More recently, Lending Club began offering small business loans in addition to personal loans.
And in December, Laplanche told Re/code that the company was pitching large corporations on the idea of using Lending Club as the platform through which they could offer loans to their employees. Google was believed to be one of those being pitched.
At the time, the CEO said the company would be profitable in 2013 on revenue of about $100 million, and would likely go public in 2014.
“There’s no urgency for us to go public,” he said at the time, “but as part of building the brand and establishing Lending Club as the bank of the next decade, I think being a public company is part of building up the brand awareness.”
Lending Club makes money by charging borrowers a loan origination fee, which typically runs around four percent. Loans start as small as $5,000$1,000. Lending Club also charges its investors a service charge of around one percent of borrower payments, according to its website.
The company has raised more than $300 million in equity and debt from Google Capital, Kleiner Perkins and others.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
