Hello Buckeye State!
We’re excited to announce that Upstart will open an R&D center in Columbus, Ohio in January 2019. This second home for Upstart will include teams dedicated to software engineering, data science, and operations and is expected to house more than 100 employees by year end. We’re also pleased to announce that Grant Schneider, Upstart’s longest tenured data scientist and triple-degreed graduate of Ohio State University, will lead the Columbus office.
Self-driving loans
Upstart is the first lending platform to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to price credit and automate the borrowing process. And frankly, we’ve been on a tear. With $2.7B in loans originated, we’ve demonstrated loss rates less than half of industry peers. More than 60% of loans originated through Upstart are entirely automated, a signal of the potential for our ML-based model to redefine credit origination. Better data science and technology have led to triple-digit revenue growth for Upstart in 2018, as well as five consecutive months of cash and GAAP profits.
But the opportunity to make affordable credit available to more people doesn’t stop with personal loans. We believe virtually all flavors of lending will be “self-driving” within a decade, and the potential to reduce the price of credit for the world is unimaginably vast. By expanding our footprint beyond the Bay Area, we aim to increase our velocity and realize the potential we see in one of the world’s first AI/ML-based lending platforms.
Our second home
At Upstart, we believe in the virtues of speed, so our decision-making progress was somewhat more efficient than Amazon’s HQ2 project. In searching for a second home, we looked for a hotbed of incredible talent, a super high quality of life, easy access from the Bay Area, and readily-available leadership that could transplant Upstart’s unique DNA to a new setting. As the home of Ohio State University and also the second-largest city in the midwest, Columbus was clearly the right answer for us. (In fact, even with a finger or two on the scale, this University of Michigan graduate couldn’t deny the obvious advantages of Columbus!)
Join us!
Upstart’s mission is to enable effortless credit based on true risk. If you’re excited about the potential for AI/ML to expand access to affordable credit, please check out www.upstart.com/columbus to see the amazing career opportunities we’re bringing to the Buckeye state!
