Avant – A Fintech Company That Started As A Product Of The Y Combinator Startup Program.
Avant is a financial technology company based in Chicago, Illinois, US. The company was formerly known as AvantCredit and was established in 2012. Avant mainly focuses on two primary products, personal loans for middle-income borrowers and Avant Credit Card which come with a credit limit of $300 to $1000. The grew as AvantCredit and created a very strong brand name for customer lending services. The founders of Avant are Al Goldstein, John Sun, and Paul Zhang. Avant is a very young company and currently, it serves customers in the US and the UK only. It is a private company with 550 employees and the CEO of the company is Matt Bochenek.
About Avant
Founded in 2012, Avant’s target was to provide loans to customers who belong to the middle-class tier of our society. These are the people that need help with home improvements, high-interest debts, etc. Avant grasped the market so quickly that it is one of the few Chicago-based startups that has gained unicorn status and is still a privately-held company. Avant’s valuation has nearly touched $2 billion. In 2013, the company issued its first personal loan and used its propriety technology to determine a person’s creditworthiness.
There are various factors that help Avant determine the amount, time, etc at which the money can be borrowed. From machine learning protocols to various analytical tools, Avant rigorously checks a customer’s profile. Avant has also built a fully online process for its customers to eliminate the need for several physical branches and simplify the overall borrowing process. The company is supported by numerous big investors like Tiger Global, August Capital, General Atlantic, Victory Park Capital, etc. When the company began offering loans, it just started with 16 states but soon expanded to Canada and the UK.
Story of Avant
Avant’s customer base includes those people who generally don’t get loans from regular banks but at the same time have decent enough income to repay loans at sizable interest. This is the reason Avant’s technology determines a person’s creditworthiness in every way possible. In 2012, two of the Avant’s co-founders Sun and Zhang were looking forward to building their business, Debteye after graduating from the Y Combinator startup program. The business was about designing a platform that would help individuals manage debts after analyzing their unique financial situation.
In the pursuit of opening a business, Sun decided to take a personal loan from a traditional brick and mortar establishment because he had no income. But, he found that the entire process of applying and the loan getting sanctioned is very time-consuming and inconvenient. So, with the idea of the new venture combined with finding a solution to smoothen the process of loan sanction, Avant emerged. Sun and Zhang were former interns of Goldstein, seeing this as an opportunity they built a product in December 2012. Avant had a very strong financial backup from the beginning as it raised $1 million in seed funding. Within the next three years, the total funding of the company touched $1 billion.
Success
Avant received a lot of awards and recognitions only within a few years after it issued the first loan. In 2015, the company ranked 6th in Forbes America’s Most Promising Companies and in the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Paul Zhang, the co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Avant was featured in Inc Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list. In the same year, the company also acquired ReadyForZero, a debt management platform, and rebranded it as Avant. In 2014 company successfully raised $225 Million in equity between Tiger Global Management, Peter Thiel, and KKR. But only after a year of the acquisition, Avant announced the shut down of ReadyForZero’s credit score and debt planner tools.
Matt Bochenek – CEO of Avant
Matt Bochenek joined Avant in 2013 in the Strategy & Operations department and after that served in many other roles. He became the CEO of the company in May 2021 and before that served as the COO for one year. Before joining Avant, he worked at Superfund Asset Management as the Managing Director of Business Development and Strategy. Matt went to the University of Chicago.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more