AG2R La Mondiale committed capital to lending platform Younited Credit. The larger round is not surprising as the alternative lending space is experiencing a recovery after the pandemic shock.
France-based online lending platform developer Younited Credit raised $170m in a round, which featured insurance firm AG2R La Mondiale. Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the asset management arm of investment bank Goldman Sachs, which participated through its growth equity unit, private equity firms Bridgepoint and Eurazeo as well as French government-owned investment bank BPIfrance’s Large Venture Fund also participated in the round. This new funding took the overall capital raised by the company to $400m.
Launched in 2011 as Prêt d’Union, Younited Credit operates a lending business, which offers amortising personal loans of up to €50,000 ($59,000), employing an artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered software platform in addition to extended payment services, budget coaching and term deposits. The company claims to have lent over $3bn to date and also provides banking-as-a-service software for banks, insurance companies, telecoms operators, online merchants and tech companies.
Younited is part of the broader alternative lending space within fintech, which has received much attention from corporate investors over the years, as the GCV Analytics bar chart below illustrates. The number of corporate-backed deals in that space reached a top of 52, registered in both 2018 and 2019, whereas the total estimated dollars in such rounds hit an all-time high of $3.39bn in 2016 but have gone down since. Over the first six months of 2021, we have already tracked 29 deals in this space with an estimated $1.73bn of total capital deployed in them. The latter suggests that valuations and deal making in this area have been recovering significantly after the pandemic shock of last year.
