Plend, the UK’s first social lending marketplace, has secured £700,000 of investment from early-stage VC’s Tomahawk, Ascension, and Haatch, as well as backing from NBS Ventures, a part of Nationwide Building Society’s Incubator. The investment will be used to disrupt the £24 billion consumer lending market and bring affordable loans to 13 million people in the UK with unreliable, inaccurate or non-existent credit files who are virtually invisible to traditional financial credit scoring systems and therefore vulnerable to financial hardship and exclusion.