Upstart (company)

Upstart is an online lending marketplace that provides personal loans using non-traditional variables, like education and employment, to predict creditworthiness.

The founding team includes Dave Girouard, former VP of Apps for Google, Paul Gu, a Thiel Fellow, and Anna Counselman, former Manager of Global Enterprise Customer Programs and Gmail Consumer Operations at Google.

Upstart first launched in April 2012 with an Income Share Agreement (ISA) product, which enabled individuals to raise money by contracting to share a percent of their future income. In May 2014, Upstart pivoted away from this product and toward the personal loan marketplace. With this pivot, Upstart began offering a traditional 3-year loan, and has since expanded to offer a 5-year loan product as well.

Upstart developed an income and default prediction model to determine creditworthiness of a potential borrower. This means that in addition to traditional underwriting criteria—FICO score, credit report, and income—the Upstart underwriting considers academic variables—colleges attended, area of study, GPA, and standardized test scores—and work history to develop a statistical model of the borrower’s financial capacity and personal propensity to repay.

Upstart raised a $1.75M seed round from First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures, Crunchfund and Mark Cuban. They subsequently raised a series A round of $5.9M which included new investors Eric Schmidt (Google Executive Chairman), Marc Benioff, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and Collaborative Fund. Jessica Jackley and Bob Kerrey serve as advisors to the company. Most recently, Upstart raised a series C round of $35M from Third Point Capital in June 2015.