PeerBerry Review 2026: Strong Record, No Licence, One Group

PeerBerry is an online marketplace where private investors fund loans issued by non-bank lenders and, increasingly, by property developers. It launched in 2017, was set up by the Aventus Group — a lending group operating in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America since 2009 — and is legally a small Croatian company, Peerberry d.o.o., run by a team in Vilnius.

On 21 September 2026 PeerBerry's homepage showed €3.54 billion invested through the platform since launch, 122,954 investors and an “average annual investment return” of 11.00%. It is one of the larger platforms in this market by volume, and its reputation rests almost entirely on one episode: how it and its lenders handled the loans stranded by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The short answer to “what is it?” is: a well-run, unlicensed marketplace whose investors are, in practice, lending to one lending group and a handful of its partners. The rest of this review explains why both halves of that sentence matter. The live figures and safety score sit on the PeerBerry platform page, and our methodology shows how the score is built.

A lending company — PeerBerry calls it a loan originator or business partner — issues a loan to a borrower in its own country. It then offers part of that loan to investors through PeerBerry. You fund a share of the loan, receive your share of the borrower's repayments, and the originator keeps the rest of the loan and the servicing.

What you are exposed to

Your return depends on the originator passing borrower repayments through PeerBerry to you. PeerBerry itself does not lend and does not guarantee loans. Its 2025 accounts describe the company as a service provider that connects investors with borrowers and project developers, and state that investors' and borrowers' money passes through Peerberry d.o.o.'s own bank account.

That last point is worth pausing on. At the end of 2025 the company's balance sheet showed €3.29 million of “other short-term liabilities”, which the notes describe as net obligations to investors on the platform. A licensed investment firm or crowdfunding provider would have to keep client money under specific safeguarding rules; PeerBerry is not subject to those rules.

Loan types

The platform lists short-term consumer loans, long-term loans, leasing, business loans and secured real-estate loans. The mix has shifted a long way from the consumer-loan platform PeerBerry was known as: the two largest exposures on its originators page in September 2026 were Vilnius property developers.

The contracting company is Peerberry d.o.o., registered in Zagreb (OIB 15815815647, MBS 081265885), with its legal address in the Sky Office business centre. Its director is Arūnas Lekavičius, who is also PeerBerry's CEO. The operating team sits in Vilnius. The 2025 accounts report no full-time employees at the Croatian company, one part-time worker and outsourced services — the staff work elsewhere in the structure.

PeerBerry moved to Croatia in 2021. In September of that year it announced it would withdraw its application for an investment brokerage firm licence in Latvia, because that licence would not cover real-estate projects, and relocate the company to Croatia while keeping the team in Lithuania.

Ownership

PeerBerry's own announcements trace the shareholders:

• In May 2021 Igoris Trofimovas bought a 50% stake alongside Ivan Butov.
• In August 2022 PeerBerry announced that Andrejus Trofimovas, the CEO of Aventus Group, had become a 50% shareholder, with Vytautas Olšauskas and Ivan Butov at 25% each.

The About page states that PeerBerry was founded by Aventus Group. Aventus describes itself as PeerBerry's main business partner, and by number of lenders most of the originators on the platform are Aventus companies or lenders PeerBerry lists as Aventus business partners. In other words, the person who runs the main supplier of loans also owns half the marketplace that sells them. That is not unusual in this sector, but it means there is no arm's-length check between the platform and its biggest counterparty.

The same shareholders set up Crowdpear, a Lithuanian crowdfunding platform licensed by the Bank of Lithuania, which PeerBerry announced in January 2022. The licence belongs to Crowdpear, not to PeerBerry.

PeerBerry accepts individuals aged 18 or over who are not citizens of a country on the FATF anti-money-laundering list, and companies.

1. 1Register with your email address and confirm it.
2. 2Enter your personal and contact details.
3. 3Switch on two-factor authentication, which PeerBerry requires.
4. 4Verify your identity. Companies also provide a business register extract, proof of the representative's authority and beneficial-owner details.
5. 5Make a SEPA transfer in euros from a bank account in your own name. The account you deposit from becomes the account you can withdraw to.
6. 6Set up an Auto Invest strategy or choose loans manually. The minimum per loan is €10.

Before depositing, read the sections below on the group guarantee and regulation, and decide how much you are willing to have exposed to a single lending group.

Getting started on PeerBerry is quick: registration, two-factor set-up and an automated ID check, which PeerBerry says takes up to 10 minutes.

Signing up After confirming your email and entering your details, you switch on two-factor authentication, which is part of registration rather than an optional extra. Verification is fully automated: you take a real-time photo of your passport or national ID card and a selfie. PeerBerry states the process "takes up to 10 minutes". Only passports and national ID cards are accepted.

Setting up Auto Invest Auto Invest can be started from one of three presets (short-term, long-term or real-estate portfolios) or built by hand. The settings cover loan originator, country, loan type, interest rate, remaining term, buyback and group guarantee, a maximum amount per loan and an amount to keep uninvested. You can run several strategies side by side, for example one per originator group. Manual investing starts at €10 per loan.

App and dashboard PeerBerry has apps for iOS and Android. On 22 September 2026 the Google Play listing showed 4.3 stars from 590 reviews. The site is available in English, German, Spanish and French. The Account Summary, on the website under Statement or in the app under Money, shows your account data for any period you choose, and you can have it emailed to you at a frequency you set.

Documents and support - Tax statement: under Statement, choose the dates, press Generate and download it. PeerBerry does not withhold tax. - Support: by email or phone, Monday to Friday, 8:00–16:00 CET. PeerBerry does not advertise a live chat.

Deposits are by SEPA bank transfer in euros only. PeerBerry does not accept cards or SWIFT payments; investors whose bank does not support SEPA can use services such as Revolut, N26 or Wise. There is no deposit fee and no deposit limit, and all loans are in euros, so there is no currency conversion on the platform.

Withdrawals are free, with a minimum of €1 and a maximum of €15,000 per transaction (larger amounts need several requests). PeerBerry says requests are processed on the same or next business day, and the money then takes up to two working days to arrive, depending on the bank. Each withdrawal must be confirmed by email within an hour or it is cancelled. You can only withdraw to an account you have deposited from; to add a new one, you first send at least €0.01 from it.

Only uninvested cash can be withdrawn this way. Money inside loans comes back as borrowers repay or when you sell on the secondary market.

You can pick loans yourself or let Auto Invest do it according to criteria you set, such as loan type, originator, term and interest rate. Auto Invest works only on the primary market; secondary market offers must be bought manually.

Each originator on the originators page shows its outstanding amount, whether its loans carry the buyback and the group guarantee, and a base interest rate. On 21 September 2026 those rates ranged from 7.5% to 10%. By our addition of the figures shown that day, about €142 million was outstanding across the listed originators.

Where the money is concentrated

The two largest single exposures were real-estate developers in Vilnius: SIBgroup at €43.65 million and Lithome at €17.41 million, together more than 40% of that total. Neither carries the group guarantee. The largest Aventus exposures were NovaLend PL (Polish business loans, €8.51 million, also without the group guarantee), Credit365 MD in Moldova (€5.91 million), CashXpress in the Philippines (€5.61 million) and Mira Segundo, a Spanish real-estate company (€5.55 million).

If you want to avoid a particular exposure — the developers, or lenders without the group guarantee — set it explicitly in Auto Invest. A default strategy follows whatever the platform offers.

Loyalty programme

Investors with an active portfolio (investments plus cash) of €10,000, €25,000 or €40,000 receive an extra 0.5%, 0.75% or 1% on future investments. The level is checked on the first day of each month and requires 90 days' membership. Bonuses do not apply to loans bought on the secondary market.

PeerBerry's homepage shows an 11.00% average annual investment return. The homepage does not say how that figure is calculated or over what period, and it is higher than any base rate on the originators page on the same day (7.5%–10%). The loyalty bonus of up to 1% could explain part of the gap for larger accounts, but we could not find PeerBerry's own definition of the figure, so treat it as a marketing number rather than an expected return.

What an individual investor earns is shown in the account as the Net Annual Return (NAR), which PeerBerry calculates with the XIRR method over all your investments since you started, including delays and bonuses. That is the number to watch.

Three things push realised returns below the headline:

• Rates are set by the originators and have moved over time. The base rates on offer in September 2026 were mostly 8%–10%.
• Cash drag: money waiting between repayments and new investments earns nothing.
• Stress events: in 2022, war-affected loans stopped paying for months before the partners resumed repayments. Interest was eventually paid, but the money was locked for up to about two and a half years.

A 10% rate on a short-term consumer loan in Kazakhstan or South Africa, or on a property development loan, is a price for risk, not a promise of income. Our risks page explains the general mechanism.

PeerBerry does not charge investors for the main activities:

• Deposits: free (SEPA only).
• Investing on the primary market: free.
• Withdrawals: free.
• Secondary market: PeerBerry states that no fees apply to buyers or sellers.

The platform earns its money from the originators. Its 2025 revenue was €2.25 million, which comes from fees the lenders pay for access to investors. That arrangement is common, but it means PeerBerry's income grows with the volume of loans it places, not with how well those loans perform for you.

The practical cost to investors is indirect: the rate an originator offers is the rate after its own margin, and selling on the secondary market at a discount is a real cost even if there is no fee. We did not find an inactivity fee in the pages we checked, but we could not review the full user agreement.

For most of its life PeerBerry had no secondary market: you waited until loans were repaid. That changed on 15 January 2026, when it launched one on the desktop site, with mobile support promised later in 2026.

The rules are restrictive:

• you can only sell an investment after holding it for 180 days, and the same applies to investments bought on the secondary market;
• you sell whole investments only — no partial sales — and not before the full loan amount has been collected;
• you can price at the remaining value or at a discount of up to 50%;
• an unsold offer is cancelled after 14 days;
• loyalty bonuses do not carry over to the buyer.

PeerBerry says loans bought on the secondary market carry the same buyback and group guarantee as on the primary market.

The 180-day rule matters more than it looks. Many consumer loans on PeerBerry are short-term and will repay before you are allowed to sell them, so the secondary market is mostly useful for longer business, leasing and real-estate loans. PeerBerry publishes no figures on secondary market volume or how quickly offers sell, so we cannot say how liquid it is. For short loans, stopping reinvestment is still the main way out.

PeerBerry offers two layers of protection, and both come from lenders, not from PeerBerry.

Buyback

If a borrower is more than 60 days late, the loan originator must buy the loan back in full with accrued interest. PeerBerry says all loans carry it. It is an obligation of the originator — a consumer lender in Moldova, Mexico or South Africa, or a property developer in Vilnius — and it is worth what that company can pay.

Group guarantee

Aventus Group and Gofingo Group companies have signed agreements under which, if one group company becomes insolvent, the others cover its liabilities. This is a real improvement on a single lender's buyback, because it spreads the obligation across a group that reported €225.68 million of equity at the end of 2025. It has three limits:

1. 1It does not cover every loan. The originators page shows no group guarantee for SIBgroup, Lithome or NovaLend PL — the largest and third-largest exposures on the platform.
2. 2It is only as strong as the group as a whole. If the problem is group-wide — a regulatory change, a funding squeeze, a war — the companies giving the guarantee are the ones in trouble.
3. 3PeerBerry states that both the buyback and the group guarantee “may be affected in case of a force majeure event”. That is exactly what happened in 2022, when buybacks on war-affected loans were replaced by a repayment schedule.

PeerBerry's own pages do not publish the guarantee agreements. None of this is a bank deposit, and no deposit guarantee or investor compensation scheme applies.

PeerBerry is not licensed. Peerberry d.o.o. is not authorised as a crowdfunding service provider under the EU Crowdfunding Regulation (ECSPR), as an investment firm, or as a payment institution. It did not appear on the list of ECSPR-licensed providers taken from ESMA's register in January 2026, and we found no announcement of a pending application.

The history is relevant. In 2021 PeerBerry was preparing for a Latvian investment brokerage firm licence and said a crowdfunding licence from the Bank of Lithuania would follow. It then withdrew the Latvian application and moved the company to Croatia; the crowdfunding licence went to a separate company, Crowdpear, owned by the same shareholders. So the group chose to put its regulated activity in one company and keep PeerBerry's loan business outside the regime.

What that means for you

• No supervisor checks PeerBerry's capital, conduct or handling of client money.
• Investor money passes through the company's own bank account, not a safeguarding account under a regulatory regime.
• There is no investor compensation scheme if PeerBerry fails, and no deposit guarantee — these are not bank deposits.
• There is no standardised key investment information sheet or appropriateness test.

This is the central difference in our Mintos vs PeerBerry comparison: Mintos is a supervised investment firm; PeerBerry's record is good, but nothing external enforces it.

The platform company

PeerBerry publishes the annual accounts of Peerberry d.o.o. for 2021 to 2025. The 2025 figures:

• revenue €2,251,607 (2024: €2,197,810);
• net profit €14,896 (2024: €579,135);
• equity €1,950,076 and total assets €5,519,493 at 31 December 2025;
• share capital €2,640.

The company is profitable and has more equity than many platforms of its size, but profit fell by more than 97% in 2025 on flat revenue. The published document contains no independent auditor's report. In 2021 PeerBerry said it would raise its share capital to €125,000 after the move to Croatia; the 2025 accounts show €2,640.

The Aventus Group

The financial strength that matters most is Aventus's, because it gives most of the buybacks and the group guarantee. In February 2026 PeerBerry published Aventus's 2025 results: net profit €95.67 million, equity €225.68 million, a loan portfolio of €346.84 million and €1.3 billion of new loans issued. Those are large numbers relative to the roughly €142 million outstanding on PeerBerry, and Aventus's CEO said the group had continued to reduce its obligations to investors.

The article does not say whether those figures are audited or name an auditor, and we did not find a consolidated audited report for Aventus Group. PeerBerry does publish some individual originator statements. Until audited group accounts are available, the group's profitability is a claim investors can read but not check independently.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, PeerBerry investors held loans from Aventus and Gofingo lenders in Russia and Ukraine that could no longer be serviced normally. The buyback was suspended for these loans under the force majeure clause, and the partners instead repaid them in monthly instalments.

PeerBerry reported progress regularly: €25.05 million repaid, then €34.8 million, then €46.5 million (92.6%). By November 2024 the figure was €50.2 million, or 99.9%, with all Russian loans repaid and about €357,000 of Ukrainian obligations left. On 16 December 2024 PeerBerry announced that all war-affected loans had been repaid, totalling €51.4 million including accrued interest.

That is a strong result. Other platforms with Russian or Ukrainian exposure in 2022 imposed losses or are still recovering. Two qualifications keep it in proportion:

• Investors got their money back over about 34 months, not within the 60 days the buyback promises. The force majeure clause did what it says: it allowed the group to set its own timetable.
• The repayment came from the group choosing and being able to pay. It shows the group's commitment and its capacity in 2022–2024, not that the structure would force repayment in a future crisis.

PeerBerry's About page says its investors “have never had any losses” and that it has had no defaulted business partners. We found no evidence contradicting that in its own announcements.

1. 1Single-group dependence. Aventus founded the platform, its CEO owns half of it, and its companies supply most lenders and the group guarantee. A problem at Aventus would reach most of the platform at once. Spreading across originators does not spread this risk.
2. 2Property developer concentration. SIBgroup and Lithome together accounted for more than 40% of outstanding loans on 21 September 2026, with the buyback as their only protection.
3. 3Platform and client-money risk. PeerBerry is unlicensed, holds investor money in its own bank account and publishes unaudited accounts with minimal share capital.
4. 4Force majeure. The buyback and group guarantee can be delayed in extraordinary events; 2022 showed that “delayed” can mean years.
5. 5Emerging-market lending. Many lenders operate in Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and similar markets, where rate caps, licensing and currencies can change quickly.
6. 6Liquidity. The secondary market requires 180 days' holding and publishes no volume data.

These are not bank deposits. Size the position so that a year of frozen repayments would be inconvenient, not damaging.

This is general information, not tax advice.

PeerBerry does not withhold any tax on interest. It states that taxation depends on the law of the country where you are tax resident and that paying the tax is entirely your responsibility. For your tax return you can generate a statement for any date range in the Statement section of your account.

In most European countries interest from P2P loans is taxable income that you declare yourself. Whether losses, bonuses and loyalty payments are treated the same way as interest differs from country to country, as do the forms. Because no tax is deducted, the full amount is usually due at home. Check with a tax adviser in your country of residence before filing.