Prosper, a US-based social lending website backed by peer CompuCredit, has raised $20m and hired Stephan Vermut as its chief executive (CEO).
Vermut, founder and managing partner of prime broker Merlin Securities, succeeds Dawn Lepore, who served as interim CEO since March last year. Aaron Vermut, head of prime services at Wells Fargo, was a founder and managing partner at Merlin Securities, and will also join Prosper as its president.
Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital led the round, and was joined by peers Accel Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Crosslink Capital and Volition Capital (which spun out of mutual fund manager Fidelity), and family offices Omidyar Network and TomorrowVentures on behalf of Ebay’s founder Pierre Omidyar and search engine Google chairman Eric Schmidt, respectively.
In total, Prosper has raised $95m. In June 2011, CompuCredit, a Nasdaq-listed financing company, reinvested in a consortium providing $17.2m to Prosper.
Separately, PayNearMe, a US-based payments platform that lets people pay for merchandise and services remotely with cash, raised $10m in its series D round led by venture capital firm August Capital and including Khosla Ventures, Maveron, which has Howard Schultz, chief executive of coffee retailer Starbucks as a founder, and True Ventures.
Schultz is also on the board of cashless payments provider Square after Starbucks invested.