LendInvest, the short-term mortgage specialist, has just put out profit figures for the year to March 31, 2015, and pretty impressive they are too: £3.1m pre-tax on revenues of £15m. The platform also provided figures for the previous year, showing profits of £1.2m on revenues of £5m. For a business that’s still investing to grow – scaling up tech, marketing, distribution and so forth – this is good going and proves it did not need June’s £22m equity investment from Chinese technology company Beijing Kunlun to keep the lights on. This is clearly a strongly profitable business that already claims a 10% share of the UK’s £3bn-a-year short-term mortgage market and is showing quarter-on-quarter growth in lending comfortably into double digits, even if the pace has slowed somewhat since late last year.

The two years for which the platform has published figures essentially cover most of its history since launch in early 2013. Over that period it facilitated about £280m of loans, which produced revenues of £20m and profits of £4.3m. These figures include both the results of the LendInvest online platform itself and those of Montello, the property fund that co-founders Christian Faes and Ian Thomas set up in late 2008. These two businesses are now being rolled together under the LendInvest brand, thereby reinforcing once again the idea that the natural long-term structure for a business such as LendInvest is an online platform combined with a dedicated fund. That’s certainly the story here. Montello’s balance sheet, which provided the capital to complete the loans that were then syndicated to peers and institutions via the LendInvest platform, has been decisive in enabling LendInvest to trade profitably almost from day one: how else would a start-up business generate profits of more than £1m in its first full year of operation? In P2P property lending, this is the formula that works.

The LendInvest figures also cast an alternative light on P2P and crowdfunding valuations, most of which have inevitably been based on the hope of future profits from platforms that are growing fast but still lossmaking. When Crowdcube raised money in the summer, it was valued at just over 10x its entire historic revenue stream. My guess at the time was that Funding Circle’s big fundraising earlier this year valued it at around 16x.

When platforms are profitable investors inevitably apply more conventional yardsticks. In this case, Beijing Kunlun’s investment valued LendInvest at £110m post-money, or about 35.5x its most recent full-year earnings. That’s definitely a “growth company valuation” but it’s just over half the price tag that LendInvest would have attracted had it been valued in line with Crowdcube. While the company’s founders are undoubtedly in a strong position to build a large, profitable digital lending business capable of carrying out an IPO, I bet part of them wishes they could be valued on the same measure as some of their loss-making contemporaries.

Elsewhere this week, there’s a fascinating video interview  with Cliff Dennett, the CEO of Soshi Games which raised £285,000 on SyndicateRoom (where I am a shareholder) in January 2014. Sadly, Soshi Games has gone into liquidation, becoming SR’s first wipe-out. Failures in early-stage equity investing are inevitable but to my knowledge this is the first time the entrepreneur behind a failed equity crowdfunding venture has spoken publicly about what went wrong. The interview is well worth watching for its insights into the hurdles that early-stage businesses face, but it’s also a strategically astute exercise in transparency by the platform. There are going to be a lot more failures in equity crowdfunding and the movement’s success and longevity will depend at least as much on how it deals with disaster as on how loudly it trumpets the triumphs.