Lending Club is a well-funded, established company and a clear leader in the fast-growing peer-to-peer lending market. Lending Club is a person-to-person lending website that pairs borrowers and lenders through a matching system that combines a search algorithm, credit decision and social networking. Lending Club is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It was founded by Renaud Laplanche and opened in 2007. Lending Club was founded on the philosophy that borrowers will be less likely to default to members of their own communities. Lending Club leverages existing communities and relationships to help minimize risk using a proprietary algorithm (LendingMatch). Lending Club can find relationships between anonymous borrowers and lenders based on factors including geographic location, educational and professional background, and connectedness within a given social network.