Cupid Founder Launches SME Crowdfunding Platform

Co-founder of Cupid Bill Dobbie has launched a crowdfunding platform for small and medium sized enterprises.

Dobbie’s latest venture, LendingCrowd, will help businesses looking for loans between £10,000 and £1m to connect with investors.

Based in Edinburgh, the company has already raised £250,000 for SMEs since launch last month.

Dobbie, who founded Cupid and is their second biggest shareholder, started the company with former Cenkos and Collins Stewart analyst Stuart Lunn.

Investors in the SMEs can get returns of 5.96% to 13% per year.

At the launch on Tuesday, Dobbie said: “Our vision for LendingCrowd is simple, we want to become a leading crowdlending business in the UK by offering investors access to different types of borrowers and providing them with the opportunity to make attractive returns.

“My involvement in start-ups and SMEs made me realise the difficulties for small businesses to secure loans.

“We recognised that the traditional model of lending doesn’t work for all borrowers all of the time and wanted to develop a credible alternative.”

LendingCrowd have so far helped a number of companies raise loans, including Manchester events company Vision Events, Fine Coffee Club and email management company Logicalware.