Is Lendio Legit? What the Public Record Shows

Lendio, Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Utah, operating from 4100 Chapel Ridge Road, Suite 500, Lehi, Utah, the address listed both on federal correspondence to the company and in its own customer agreements. It was founded in 2011 and is led by co-founder and chief executive Brock Blake (About Lendio). Lendio's own site describes a marketplace of more than 75 funding partners reached through one application.

The company's legal disclosure, printed in the footer of every page on lendio.com, is the single most important sentence for anyone reading this because they are behind on payments:

A federal judge described the model the same way. In a January 6, 2026 order in a fraud case brought against the company, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio wrote that "Lendio is a loan marketplace which attempts to connect small businesses with loans" (Order, Just Cause Marketing, Inc. v. Lendio, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-724 (S.D. Ohio Jan. 6, 2026)).

Lendio is registered in the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System under NMLS ID 1998423. Its California activity runs through Lendio Partners, LLC, described in Lendio's own disclosure as a wholly owned subsidiary and a licensed finance lender and broker under California Financing Law License No. 60DBO-44694. That is a broker license as well as a lender license, which is consistent with the marketplace description.

This is the part that changes what you should actually do, and it is documented in Lendio's own Terms of Application, last revised January 13, 2023. When you apply, you agree that:

• "You are submitting this application to Lendio and to third-party lenders, finance companies, and/or other third parties that are involved with or provide commercial loans or purchases of receivables (collectively 'Recipients')."
• "Lendio may share all information and documents, excluding consumer credit reports, with Recipients to fulfill Applicant's requests."
• "Lendio and Recipients may share information they have about you and Applicant at any time for administrative, marketing and servicing purposes as permitted by law."
• "Please be advised that some business financing products may require a personal guaranty."
• In capital letters at the end: "YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS AN APPLICATION FOR A COMMERCIAL LOAN OR PURCHASE OF FUTURE RECEIVABLES."

Read that last line again. "Purchase of future receivables" is the legal structure of a merchant cash advance. One application on a marketplace can produce either a term loan or an advance, and the two are governed by very different rules.

Five practical consequences follow from the structure:

None of this is hidden. It is all published on Lendio's own website. But it is not what most people picture when they use a marketplace, and the gap between the picture and the paperwork is where borrowers get hurt.

Lendio publishes its own review figures on its customer reviews page: 4.6 stars from roughly 21,600 Trustpilot reviews, more than 520,000 loans funded, more than $17 billion in small business funding facilitated over the last decade, 50 percent repeat customers, and 75 or more lenders. Those are the company's own published numbers, self-selected and self-presented, and we cite them as such rather than as an independent audit.

One footnote on the same site materially changes how to read the headline totals. Footnote 3 states: "Funding amounts and number of total loans funded include loans funded under the Paycheck Protection Program."

Lendio's own April 22, 2021 press release reported more than 213,000 PPP loan approvals totaling $9.8 billion, and, in the same release, said that "before its role in facilitating PPP loans during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lendio had originated just over $2 billion to 100,000 small businesses since its inception in 2011." Put those three numbers side by side and the pandemic relief program accounts for a large share of the lifetime totals now used in marketing.

That is not an accusation of anything. It is arithmetic from the company's own disclosures, and it is worth knowing before you treat "$17 billion facilitated" as a measure of ordinary marketplace volume.

The clearest documented account of a borrower dispute is the complaint in Just Cause Marketing, Inc. v. Lendio, Inc.

As summarized by the court in its January 2026 order, the plaintiff alleges that Lendio represented it could promptly help obtain a Small Business Administration loan; that after indicating an SBA loan was forthcoming, Lendio offered to help arrange a short term, high interest bridge loan from a third-party lender to cover the four weeks the SBA was expected to take; and that after the bridge loan was taken, Lendio notified the plaintiff it was "no longer eligible" for the SBA loan, leaving it with the expensive bridge debt.

The complaint characterizes this as a "bait and switch." Those are allegations in a pending case. Lendio moved to compel arbitration, the case was transferred to Utah under the forum selection clause on January 6, 2026, and a renewed motion to compel arbitration and stay was filed on February 25, 2026. No court has found the allegations true (docket, D. Utah No. 2:26-cv-00011).

We are not publishing Better Business Bureau figures here. The BBB site blocks automated verification, and on a page whose entire value is that every number can be checked, an unverifiable rating does not belong.

Method: a search of the CourtListener and RECAP federal docket archive on August 11, 2026 for dockets naming Lendio, Inc. as a party. Seven such dockets exist, filed between 2011 and 2026. This archive covers federal courts only, RECAP coverage of federal dockets is incomplete, and state court filings are largely outside it. The list below is what the federal record shows, not a complete litigation history.

Two patterns are worth naming. First, there is no borrower class action in this record, and no case in it that produced a finding of liability against Lendio. Second, the character of the docket fits a marketplace rather than a funder: telephone marketing claims, a trademark claim, a copyright claim over an image, a wage dispute, and one fraud claim about how a referral was handled.

There are no collection suits, because a marketplace that does not hold the paper does not file them. That absence is itself information about who you are dealing with.

On May 14, 2020, at the height of the first round of the Paycheck Protection Program, the FTC's Division of Financial Practices and the SBA's Office of General Counsel sent Lendio a joint warning letter. It opened: "This letter is to advise you that Lendio, Inc. ('Lendio') and its lead generators may be unlawfully misleading small business consumers about federal loans or other temporary small business relief in violation of the Federal Trade Commission ('FTC Act')."

The specific conduct described was advertising by third parties operating for Lendio. The letter states that FTC staff reviewed marketing "by, or on behalf of, Lendio, including IT Media Solutions, LLC and the website sba.com, and Merchants Advance Network, Inc. and the website manfunding.com."

It flagged that sba.com had touted "Your Paycheck Protection Program Loan starts here," that the sites suggested an affiliation with the SBA, and that Merchants Advance Network had represented itself as an authorized SBA loan packager charging "a nominal fee of $495 per business," when "agents, including lead generators and others providing PPP application assistance, are prohibited from charging fees to PPP loan applicants." The agencies asked Lendio to respond within 48 hours.

The FTC's public page for the matter is the FTC warning letter to Lendio, Inc., and the agency's press release announced it the same week.

Now the counterweight, which matters just as much. A warning letter is not a complaint, a consent order, a fine or a finding that anyone broke the law. The letter itself uses the words "may be" and says the claims "would violate" the FTC Act only "to the extent that any of these claims are not truthful." The published FTC record of this matter consists of the letter and the press release; the agency did not announce a subsequent enforcement action against Lendio.

The second piece of context is a negative finding, and it is the sort of thing that only turns up if you actually check. When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released its December 1, 2022 staff report on fintechs and PPP fraud, its announcement identified the investigated companies as Kabbage, Bluevine, Blueacorn PPP, LLC and Womply, Inc., together with partner banks Cross River Bank and Celtic Bank.

Lendio is not among them, despite having facilitated more PPP volume than most of the market. If you have seen Lendio lumped in with the fintechs Congress investigated, that is not what the congressional record says.

Step one: find out who your creditor actually is. Open the funding agreement, not the Lendio emails. The party name at the top is the company that owns your balance. If you have taken more than one round, you may have more than one funder, sometimes stacked, each debiting separately.

Step two: identify what you signed, a loan or a purchase of receivables. Lendio's own application terms say the product may be either. A merchant cash advance structured as a purchase of future receivables is priced with a factor rate rather than an interest rate, is generally not governed by usury caps, and behaves very differently in a workout than a term loan does. Our explainer on merchant cash advance relief walks through the difference.

Step three: check for a personal guaranty and a security interest. The application terms warn that some products require a personal guaranty. Whether one exists determines whether your personal assets are exposed and changes the negotiating picture entirely.

Step four: negotiate with the funder, not the marketplace. Lendio says it does not make credit decisions. Asking Lendio to lower your payment is asking a party with no authority over the contract. The funder's collections or workout desk is the one that can change anything. Our guide on how to settle business debt covers what that conversation actually looks like.

Step five: do not stack another advance on top. Taking a second position to cover a first is the single most common way a manageable cash flow problem becomes an unmanageable one.