The idea did not arrive in a boardroom. In 2008, as the banking system shook, three friends from Oxford talked about a peer-to-peer lending marketplace in a pub. Samir Desai, James Meekings and Andrew Mullinger were not obvious revolutionaries. Desai had been a consultant at BCG and then an investment executive at Olivant.
I could not find where Desai grew up or what his parents did, and I will not invent it. What the record gives is the stakes. In 2009, with the financial crisis still biting, the three quit their jobs. The platform did not launch until August 2010, so for a year there was a plan, a team and no revenue.
A start-up that had only just launched suddenly had the state as a customer.
That gap is the hidden part of the story. It is easy to treat founding as a launch date. For these three it was a year of walking away from salaries to build something banks had made urgent. Small firms were being squeezed, and the founders bet that savers could lend to them directly.
The turn came in 2012, when the British government used the platform to lend GBP20m to small businesses. A start-up that had only just launched suddenly had the state as a customer. In 2013 it raised $37m led by Accel Partners and went into the United States. In October 2015 it bought Zencap and reached Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
Then came the price of getting big. Funding Circle listed in London in September 2018, raising about GBP300m at GBP1.5bn, with the Danish investor Anders Povlsen anchoring the offering. Shares fell 24% on the first day. In 2019 pre-tax losses grew to GBP50.7m, and lenders reportedly waited almost 100 days to sell unwanted loans. In April 2020 the secondary market was suspended during COVID.
The company changed shape. In March 2022 it left peer-to-peer lending for an institutional model, and in July 2024 it sold its US operations. Desai left the board in October 2024, the last original founder to go. For 2025 it reported revenue of GBP222.5m and net income of GBP46.0m.
The lesson is in the pub. The best ideas often begin as complaints between friends, but the work is a year of quiet leaving before anyone else notices.