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AvantCredit raised $75 million this month, which will push the personal loans company to double its employee base, co-founder and executive chairman Al Goldstein said.
“We are going to need to grow our employee base dramatically and at least double in the next 12 months and we will probably double again beyond that,” Goldstein said.
The need for all the extra manpower, you ask? Well, the AvantCredit team (currently clocking in at 120 people) has some big goals to reach. They have been around barely over a year, but they are already expanding from currently serving 18 states to soon serving all 50 with online personal loans. Simultaneously, the company is growing in the UK, where they launched about three months ago.
The additional employees will staff call centers as well as beef up AvantCredit’s engineering, product management and digital marketing teams. Although the entire team is currently concentrated in Chicago, Goldstein said opening up additional offices on the coasts isn’t out of the question especially because all of the company’s investors such as August Capital are on either coast.
As of now, AvantCredit has issued over 25,000 loans that average from $3,000 to $5,000. Goldstein said his goal for AvantCredit in the next five years is to hit $1 billion loaned, aka increasing the number of loans issued by about 800 percent in the next five years.
Although there are competitors like Springleaf and OneMain Financial to keep an eye on, Goldstein said the AvantCredit team isn’t worried: “The space is very large, so it’s not really competitors, it’s really your own execution and that’s what were are focused on more. It’s just making sure that we move fast and grow our business for our customers’ needs”
Although it is hard to estimate the size of the personal loans market (as loans are issued from many different players), organizations across the board have reported an uptick in lending since the recession. AvantCredit fits into this market as the potential “next online Capital One,” Goldstein said, by setting themselves apart with quick, online credit decisions powered by machine learning.
“For us, the faster we can make credit decisions, the cheaper we can provide the service,” Goldstein said. “Machine learning is the next revolution of data analytics. We are the first company using machine learning and applying it to credit decisions that we are aware of. The math itself is only 10 years old, so the data and its implementations for engineers is pretty exciting.”
When asked if all this advantageous growth could lead an IPO in the near future (considering competitor Springleaf filed in fall 2013), Goldstein said: “An IPO would be the cheapest form of capital, but our goal really is to build a transformational business.”
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