Before Lendable lent a penny, one of its founders was filming young people who were trying to fix the world.
Victoria van Lennep co-founded GoYoung, an educational tool and documentary about young social entrepreneurs around the world. She also won a fellowship from the Fondation Wiener-Anspach for a master's in nature, society and environmental policy at Oxford in 2012-13. Then she took a job as thought leadership deputy editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Nothing in that path points to consumer credit.
A GBP 2.5M seed from angels, including Passion Capital, paid for the early lending engine.
That is the part nobody expects. In 2014 she joined Martin Kissinger, with Paul Pamment and Jakob Schwarz, to start a lender in London. Public sources say little about Kissinger's own childhood or schooling, so this is less a tale of one wound than of a team that decided a loan should be quicker, cheaper and less bureaucratic. A 2017 Independent profile described the aim as undercutting banks on speed, red tape and price.
The first money was small. A GBP 2.5M seed from angels, including Passion Capital, paid for the early lending engine. It used UK open banking data to approve loans and pay out quickly. And here was the shift that made it a company rather than a clever app. Lendable did not hold the loans on its own balance sheet. It originated and serviced them for institutional investors, a two-sided marketplace.
The cheques followed the proof. Waterfall Asset Management put in GBP 100M in March 2017, and the company is reported to have turned profitable that year. A year later Goldman Sachs committed GBP 200M. By early 2021 a secondary share sale made Lendable a unicorn. In March 2022 Ontario Teachers' led a GBP 210M round at around GBP 3.5bn.
Expansion came with risk. It launched Autolend car finance and entered the United States in 2021, then Mexico in 2026, and in October 2025 launched a mobile product with Gigs. A lender depends on funding and bad-debt discipline, and no public source I read details Lendable's losses on any of these ventures.
The figures are now large: GBP 446M revenue and GBP 114M operating income in 2025, and by Experian data the UK's biggest personal loan issuer by volume.
For a founder, the quiet lesson is in that CV. The people who built a profitable lender came from journalism and social enterprise. Obsession with fixing a boring, unfair process can matter more than a finance pedigree.