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investors
Lendosphere is a French crowdfunding site that lends savers' money to renewable energy projects — solar farms, wind parks, biogas plants and heat networks — and to the companies that build them.
You lend from EUR 50 per project and receive a fixed rate, almost always 7% a year, with your money back over an average of 41 months. What you actually buy is a bond or a loan issued by the company that owns the project; if that company cannot pay, Lendosphere is only an intermediary and your recourse is a debt collection agency.
The platform started in 2014, has lent EUR 465.8 million to 809 projects and has 46,983 registered members. It is owned by the Paris fund manager 123 Investment Managers and now runs a second brand, Lendopolis, under the same company.
It is licensed by France's financial regulator, the AMF, as a crowdfunding service provider under number FP-2023-22, granted on 7 November 2023.
Anyone over 18 with a euro bank account can join, though six of the ten deals open in late August 2026 were reserved for people living in specific French departments.
Cash waiting to be invested sits at Lemonway, a licensed French payment firm, separately from Lendosphere's own money, but there is no deposit guarantee and no compensation scheme once the money is lent.
Lendosphere charges investors nothing; it is paid by the project companies, taking 2% to 6% of each amount raised plus annual management fees.
License / Regulation: ECSPR PSFP (AMF France), passported ES and PT | Licence FP-2023-22 |
Lendosphere says an in-house team of financial, legal and technical specialists checks each project, and it publishes the full contract pack on every project page. It does not publish a checklist, a scoring method, or how many applications it turns down, and it gives no risk grade at all — unlike its French rival Enerfip, which grades deals A to C. Some prospectuses are detailed: one 320 megawatt solar portfolio spells out that 195 megawatts have land secured but studies still running, 74 megawatts have a planning application filed and only 34 megawatts are permitted with a price agreed. But the rate is 7.00% either way, so nothing in the price tells you which kind of risk you are taking.
Lendosphere was founded in 2014 by Laure Verhaeghe, a former environmental journalist who worked in wind development, and Amaury Blais, an engineer who worked at the banks Natixis and BNP Paribas. Both still run the company: Verhaeghe is president and Blais a managing director, alongside Mathieu Rochard. The team is around 15 people. Since 2021 the business has belonged to 123 Investment Managers, a Paris firm founded in 2001 that manages more than EUR 4.5 billion of unlisted assets. In November 2024 it bought rival platform Lendopolis, and by December 2025 the two had been merged into one company, Lendocompany, which now runs both websites under a single licence.
Lendosphere publishes updates on funded projects and, unusually, names distressed borrowers with the sums outstanding on its regulatory page. Beyond that it publishes no monitoring policy and no reporting timetable, and investors on French forums complain that news about projects is hard to get. Security varies deal by deal and is generally weaker than a bank's: usually a first-ranking pledge over the shares of the company that owns the project, sometimes a promise from the parent company, sometimes nothing stated. On one 229 megawatt programme the crowdfunded loan sits behind EUR 261 million of bank debt. If a borrower fails, the platform's stated remedy is that lenders can use a debt collection agency.
Investing is free. Lendosphere charges no joining fee, no management fee and no fee on repayments. The only charge is 1% if you pay money in and then withdraw it without investing. There is no resale fee because there is no resale market. The project companies pay instead: 2% to 6% of the amount raised, annual management fees of 0.2% to 1% of the balance outstanding, and setup fees of EUR 3,000 to EUR 5,000. Tax is the real cost for French residents: the platform withholds 31.4% at source, made up of 12.8% income tax and 18.6% social charges. Lower earners can apply to have the income tax part waived, leaving only the 18.6%.
On Trustpilot Lendosphere scores 3.7 out of 5 from only 54 reviews, with 15% at one star. The complaints name specific projects: more than a year of missed payments on RORI Partners, weeks or months to get a reply, and repayments once sent to the wrong bank account. The more serious criticism sits on the French forum MoneyVox, where a post of 29 November 2025 accused the platform of showing statistics free of any insolvency proceedings despite known defaults, said formal complaints went unanswered within the promised ten days, and alleged that around ten flattering reviews appeared within a week of a negative one — an allegation, not a proven fact. The transparency point has substance: trade press repeated a zero-defaults claim in 2026 while the platform's own page showed one insolvency and three projects over six months late. No regulator has sanctioned Lendosphere, and no court case against it was found.
Only about half the money has come back — 441 of 809 projects fully repaid and 51% of capital returned — so most of the book has yet to prove itself, and pre-planning solar portfolios sold in 2025 and 2026 will not show problems until 2027 to 2029. And the two borrowers in trouble are not power plants at all: Akrocean measures wind conditions at sea and RORI was a building energy-efficiency and property credit. No solar, wind, biogas or heat-network project financed by Lendosphere has been found in insolvency proceedings.
