LendTech Capital Partners is a new investment advisor focused on equity investments in the marketplace lending industry. Their newly created fund brings together industry leaders Liberum, Ranger Capital, and Velocity Venture Group.
Liberum is a London based investment bank that has raised over $1.9 billion for marketplace lending funds and platforms. Ranger Capital has two offerings in the marketplace lending industry. The Ranger Specialty Income Fund is their private fund that invests on US platforms and the Ranger Direct Lending Fund is a publicly traded fund on the London Stock Exchange (RDL). The final partner, Velocity Venture Group has investment experience in the payments, transaction services and banking industries deploying over $3 billion. We spoke to Bill Kassul, who is Partner at the Ranger Specialty Income Fund to learn more about LendTech Capital Partners.
They began talks about the creation of what became LendTech in late 2014. Both Liberum and Ranger have been around the marketplace lending industry for quite some time and have had an immense amount of experience doing due diligence and making debt investments on various platforms. They continued to see companies flourish as the platforms were able to bring in debt investors and the team felt they were leaving money on the table by only having exposure to debt investing. There were instances where they could negotiate warrants and options as part of these deals, but they still lacked a focus when it came to private equity investments.
Ranger doesn’t have a private equity group, but they saw an opportunity to bring on others with experience in this area. With their public fund in London, they had the option to invest 10% of the funds raised in equity, but for many reasons they have not done much in the way of equity investments so far. They didn’t see the need to increase the risk in the fund which is already doing well returning 12%. In addition, many of the platforms they work with are already profitable so they have little need for capital in exchange for giving up equity. [Read more…]