Underdog Founders - Lika founded Lendwill to build the company she needed growing up.
How do you unlock life-saving capital for people with no credit history as through tech?
Will Smith isn’t cool these days, but we’ve all watched the Pursuit of Happyness (not a typo).
Would you lend him 1k USD to keep a roof over his family?
So would Lika (Anzhelika_Osmanova), the founder of Lendwill, but things used to be different.
Anzhelika was born in Kazakhstan.
Her father was the only source of income in the family.
She knew she had to move to another country if she wanted to help her family and build her own life.
Studying hard got her a scholarship in Norway, and she took the leap.
8k USD/year sounded amazing for local standards, but it was 4x less than min wage.
Making it to the end of the month was super tough.
She got a part-time job while studying - but it wasn’t enough.
Things got real.
She started losing weight.
Borrowing cash from friends became unavoidable.
She had to keep track of who she owed money to, since she wouldn’t dare ask the same person twice.
Airbnb allowed you to get inside a stranger’s home without meeting them in person.
But it was so hard to find a stranger you could borrow a few bucks from.
Plus, when she paid them back, it wasn't visible to others.
Landing a job in Norway was also hard - she applied to be a cleaner with a masters degree, and also got rejected for that.
Her 1st salary was 11 USD/hour - enough to survive, not enough for a visa.
She worked 12-14 hours/day, until her company was restructured and she was let go.
Pressed because of her visa, she was able to get an offer exactly 1 day before it expired.
While this is happening, she kept thinking about easier solutions to lend and borrow money.
A friend told her about an accelerator program, The Factory.
She got accepted.
Post-acceleration, bad investor feedback rained down:
“It’s never gonna work”
“You’re never gonna build this”
And my personal favorite:
“You’ll never achieve anything without me as your investor”
Seeing this, a startup friend organized a pizza gathering and together they invited all the investors they knew.
Lika pitched one final time and asked:
“So, who will invest?”
Arms go up, one by one, and Lendwill’s first round was closed in 2019.
They’ve since raised 400k through Seedrs (@Seedrs), becoming one of their most popular startups.
She even scored Trond Riiber Knudsen (@TrondRiiber), a famous Norwegian investor, getting them covered in local news.
That same year, Anzhelika hit the cover of Forbes and became a 30-U-30.
Lendwill launched on Dec 26, after getting a license to provide P2P loans.
KYC/AML is automated and credit history is saved on the Hyperledger blockchain fabric.
2,000 transfers have been returned to lenders, at a 0.01% default rate.
Talk about building a company to solve a problem you know well.
Lika, you’re a rockstar.
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Underdog Founders - Anzhelika (Lika) Osmanova from Lendwill
#p2plending #fintech