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In July 2011, we were fortunate to lead the Series D financing round in Lending Club, founded in 2006 by Renaud Laplanche. Along with Zopa (UK company) and Prosper, Lending Club was a pioneer of the now-familiar marketplace lending model, which cut interest costs for high quality borrowers by as much as 50% (not a typo) and at the same time offered investors attractive risk-adjusted returns not available elsewhere. This was a fundamental innovation in financial services that is thriving globally and will continue to gain in importance. Read more
Digital Currency for Virtual Worlds
In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash, we were introduced to the concept of a Metaverse, the 3d mixed reality heir to the Internet marked by a convergence of the physical and virtual worlds. Technologists have been trying to bring [...] Read more
Numerai
Today, we're excited to announce that USV is leading the Series A round of financing in Numerai’s management company. Read more
Payjoy
Sometime in the late 90s I picked up my first mobile phone, a Motorola StarTAC. The sound quality wasn’t great but it was a radical change to no longer be tethered to a wireline. Next up was the Blackberry, which [...] Read more
Can Mobile Banking Improve The Lives Of The Poor?
eShares
Anyone who owns shares or options in a private company instinctively knows that cap table management remains frustratingly analog. At USV, we own equity interests in more than 50 companies. For many of our portfolio companies we own three or [...] Read more
Why It’s Expensive to be Poor (And Why It Shouldn’t Be)
I spent the day yesterday at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in DC, at an event discussing mobile payments and related innovations and regulatory issues. Naturally, this is a big issue, with the huge rush to mobile everything, the continued expansion of [...] Read more
SigFig
Investment management is an increasingly important problem. With the decline of defined benefit plans and the increasingly shaky social security system, most people will have to rely primarily on their savings and retirement accounts to fund living expenses after they [...] Read more
Auxmoney
Today we are delighted to announce that we have made an investment in Auxmoney, an online credit marketplace in Germany. The CEO, Raffael Johnen was in London last week and appeared on a LeWeb panel with the CEOs of two [...] Read more