Lending Express, an Israeli fintech claiming bragging rights as "the only AI [artificial intelligence] powered marketplace for business loans", today announced the securing of an US$2.7 million investment round, led by Entrée Capital, iAngels, and existing investors. Lending Express' technology matches small and medium businesses with the most relevant lenders. Through their proprietary AI-powered AlgoScore and MatchScore algorithms they claim to be able to accurately predict the likelihood of a potential business to be funded and match the most relevant SMBs with the right lender, financial solution, and terms, providing lenders with the most qualified customers and thus increasing conversion rates from application to loan. The funds will be used to build out the Lending Express loan-matching technology and scale up operations in the United States and Australia. Company founder and CEO Eden Amirav told Banking Day at the Alt Finance conference last month that he had deliberately chosen Australia as a testing ground - largely run from Israel - to increase the chances of success of breaking into the US market with a proven business model. This funding round comes on the heels of a long running growth period. Over the past 12 months, Lending Express increased its total number of loans matched six-fold. It has connected SMEs to US$44.8 million in funding since operations began in late 2016, and the firm released a statement that it expects to quadruple their amount of US funding in three quarters from US$1.3 million to US$5.2 million, demonstrating strong and consistently increasing demand.At CeBIT, the annual technology expo and talkfest - which ran in Sydney last week - a panel of venture capitalists suggested as a rule of thumb that founders will sell off ten to 20 per cent of their company each funding round.Whether or not this is the case here is conjecture as, when this question was posed, a company spokesperson said: "Lending Express is unable to discuss numbers regarding valuation at this time."