LendUp

LendUp

Sasha Orloff, co-founder and CEO of LendUp, speaking at the Milken Global Conference in 2018
Type	Private
Industry	Consumer Finance
Founded	2012
Founders	Sasha Orloff (CEO) Jake Rosenberg (CTO)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Area served	Nationwide
Key people	Bill Donnelly (CFO) Vijesh Iyer (COO) Nigel Morris (Board Chair) Frank Rotman (Board Member) Blake Byers (Board Member)
Products	credit cards; single-payment, short-term loans; installment loans
Number of employees	approx. 250 (Q3, 2018)
Website	www.lendup.com

LendUp is a financial technology company that provides loans and credit cards, as well as financial education, access to credit reporting and gamification for responsible lending behavior.^[1][2]

Funding

LendUp graduated out of the Y Combinator batch of 2012.^[3] It has received $325 million in equity and debt financing from PayPal,^[4]Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Alexis Ohanian and QED among others.^{[1][5][6][7][8]}

In August, 2016 LendUp announced its Series C round of equity, led by Y Combinator.^[9]

In March, 2017, LendUp announced it received a $100 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital and surpassed $1 billion in loan originations.^[10]

Founders

LendUp’s co-founders are step brothers Sasha Orloff and Jake Rosenberg. Through school and early jobs they went separate ways. Orloff worked in consumer credit and then venture capital at Grameen Bank, World Bank and Citi. Following an internship at 16, Rosenberg became Yahoo! employee #80 and stayed for more than a decade, before joining Zynga as a platform CTO at 29. In the summer of 2011 Orloff asked Rosenberg to join him to found LendUp. They sought to solve problems with the financial services industry, which Rosenberg claimed could be solved through technology.^{[11] [12]}

History

LendUp loans to customers that banks usually decline,^[13] giving borrowers with poor credit scores access to credit cards and short term loans.^[14] Many of the loans offered by the company represent an alternative to payday loans for customers.^[15]LendUp’s two Visa cards are issued by TAB Bank and Beneficial State Bank. They feature longer-than-usual grace periods before late fees kick in, and interest rates range from about 20 to 30 percent on credit lines up to $2,000. The card business is growing more quickly than the firm’s lending product.^[16]LendUp has called its customers “the emerging middle class.”^[17] Its customers generally have credit scores below 680.^[18]

Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One and QED Investors, serves as LendUp’s Board Chair.^[19]Other Board members include QED co-founder Frank Rotman, an early Capital One Financial Corp. executive and its long-time chief credit officer, and Blake Byers of GV.^[20]

Board advisors include Carrie Dolan, Ali Rowghani, and others.^[21][22]

In September 2016 LendUp was fined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a California state regulator over widespread violations of payday- and installment-lending laws and agreed to pay $6.3 million in penalties and customer repayments. The CFPB found that the company didn’t give consumers the opportunity to build credit or access to cheaper loans in certain states, as it had claimed it would.^[15][23]

In May 2017, LendUp announced plans to quadruple the number of credit cards available to consumers through its partnership with Beneficial State Bank.^[24][25]As of May 2018, the company had surpassed this goal.^[26]

In June 2017, LendUp and the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program launched Finance Forward, alongside Mayor Stephen K Benjamin of Columbia, SC. Finance Forward is a multi-city event series that brings together elected officials, businesses, community advocates and nonprofit leaders to identify and advance actionable solutions to the growing problem of income volatility in the U.S.^[27][28]

In November, 2017, the company announced that former Tesla executive William Donnelly joined as CFO.^[29]

References