The new Ledge app lets you easily lend money to friends

Powered by Venmo, peer-to-peer lending platform, Ledge, launches today

Peer-to-peer lending platform, Ledge, launched today thanks in part to a recent funding round nearing $1 million. At its core, Ledge is basically a way to remove the awkwardness of asking friends and family for money.

It's never fun to ask and let's be honest, a lot of the time people don't get paid back for one reason or another. Ledge alleviates most, if not all, of those problems.

Think of Ledge as crowdfunding website like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. But instead of promising a product in return, you are promising to pay them back. It works like this.

You decide that you need some extra funds for something, let's say it's a cross-country move. You would then set up a campaign similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, describe what you need the money for, and how quickly you plan on paying everyone back and when you actually plan to starting paying back loans.

You also set up an interest rate with your campaign so that generous lenders are not only paid back in full, but get a little extra cheddar on top.

Ledge is powered by Venmo, a digital wallet service, so everything is tied in with your Venmo account. This makes the process of paying everyone back a breeze. When the loan period starts, Ledge will calculate all of your payments and start paying people back from your Venmo wallet.

The brilliance is that by using Venmo for money transactions, Ledge does not actually touch any of the money and can avoid a lot of those pesky rules that are associated with lending money.

Ledge just launched today and is available for Android and iOS.