Aven
Aven is re-inventing consumer credit to reduce the cost of capital through tech. Our team believes access to capital is a fundamental human right in a capital economy. Today there is over $1T of unsecured credit card revolving balance.
Credit cards were invented in the ‘60s, and credit card balances have grown from 4B to 1T in 50 years. Today transactional friction of secured capital is driving high costs of capital to consumers. Unsecured credit (personal loans and credit cards) are efficient (cheap & quick underwriting, 1-3 days to access capital) but are expensive (15-25% APR). However, secured capital (HELOC, Auto-loans, Mortgages) are inefficient (thousands in origination costs, weeks in underwriting, months in access) but are cheap (<10% APR)
We can use technology to improve the transactional efficiency of secured lending by an order of magnitude or more and give consumers access to cheap secured capital at the same level of convenience as expensive unsecured capital.
Aven is the world’s cheapest, no gimmick, credit card backed by home or car equity.
Our work involves building the world’s first completely autonomous asset-securing process, world-class risk & underwriting models, and a beautifully smooth product experience for consumers to apply, activate, and manage their credit cards.
Why join us?
We are funded by Vinod Khosla (KV), Keith Rabois (Paypal, Square, OpenDoor) @ Founders Fund, Max Levchin (Affirm, Paypal), Mike Vernal @ Sequoia, Elad Gil (Color), Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) and Raymond Tonsing (Caffeinated Capital)
Our founding/exec team is the who's who of technology and finance world. Our founders include 1. CEO (ex Product Director Facebook, Microsoft) 2. CTO (ex Founder of Autonomous Vehicles Company Scotty Labs, ex Zenefits and Microsoft Azure) 3. Chief Risk Officer (JPL, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Earnest) 4. Head of Design (Early Designer at Square)
We have a unique business idea powered by powerful technology that has already gotten the backing of the best in the fintech world.
Engineering at Aven
Current engineering team is 20 IC engineers, CEO, CTO, COO, Head of Design, Chief Risk Officer. Everyone on the team codes. We are all current or former engineers including our CEO & COO.
You can think of aven as an api for liquidity. you register your assets with aven and in exchange the system provides you liquidity on demand. As a consumer, the interface to that api is a credit card.
In order to issue an asset backed credit line, we have to risk price both the borrower and the backing asset. This has to be done while maintaining the simple experience of applying for a credit card. It requires us to pull data from various sources like income, payroll, tax data, property data, credit data, id and fraud data etc. All of these sources have their own set of inaccuracies and missing data. We have to form a complete and accurate picture of both the asset and the borrower. In addition we have to be able to establish a security interest on their asset (home equity, car, crypto). It requires building our own video notarization stack, and our own remote controlled signature robot. In addition, we have to be able to parse different types of tax, income, and property related documents automatically. This allows us to offer collateralized debt and credit cards at a rate 2x cheaper than anyone else.
Remote Wet Signatures: One of the challenges in closing home equity based credit lines is the issue of wet signatures during the closing process. This requires an in-person visit to the notary increasing the time and cost of closing. Aven has invented a robot that the consumer controls to remotely affix a wet signature to the closing documents. This allows us to execute asset backed transactions anywhere in the US with minimum user friction.
Remote Notary: Home equity backed credit lines require notarization at closing time. We have built our customer audio/video solution for remote notarization allowing us to control consumer experience down to the pixel, instead of relying on third parties. This also integrates our remote wet signature solution as part of the closing process.
Risk modeling. We are building an in house asset and consumer risk processing system that looks at signals from bank accounts, credit bureaus and other public and private data sources to continuously score a person and associated assets. This is used to determine the price (interest rate) and credit limits offered to a person in real time as they continue to use the available credit. As things change about their behavior or the pricing of the asset, the price and limits automatically adjust.
Document data extraction and data aggregation. We use computer vision to extract information from uploaded documents like licenses, insurances documents, etc. We also use data from multiple sources to figure out asset prices and consumer behavior. Its a very interesting data aggregation and modeling challenge.
Complex Financial Workflows. We build complex financial workflows as it comes to offering credit lines and recovering payments from people.
Working at Aven
We are a consumer company and are engineering and experimentation driven. We believe in moving with extremely high velocity. We believe that high velocity execution with reasonable strategy beats great strategy with slow execution any day of the week.
Cultural Values: Depth and rigor of thought. Speed of execution with reasonable strategy. Done is better than perfect.
As part of our commitment to an inclusive workplace, we are happy to offer prospective engineers the chance to connect with our engineering employees who come from underrepresented backgrounds. It’s a way to get a better sense of our team and what it might be like to work with us.
If you’re interested in connecting with our team, be sure to bring this up during one of our introductory calls!
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Flexible Hours
Most of our engineers are in the office from 10 AM until 5 or 6 PM, but we don't have any hard rules around this. If you need a work-from-home day, feel free to take one! We care about productivity, not hours.
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Health Insurance
We provide full medical, dental and vision coverage.
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Generous Vacation
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Team Activities
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Work from Home
External Links
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