Aven cofounder and CEO Sadi Khan says he wants to cut Americans’ borrowing costs in half.
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Today, six-year-old fintech lender Aven announced a new $110 million fundraise at a $2.2 billion valuation, up from $1 billion about a year ago. The Series E financing was led by Khosla Ventures, with existing backers General Catalyst, Caffeinated Capital, GIC, Electric Capital and Founders Fund also participating. The news comes the same week that eight-year-old home equity lender Figure is slated to go public at a $4 billion valuation.
Aven serves a niche of U.S. homeowners with above average credit scores, helping them tap into their home’s equity to earn lower interest rates, and injecting that borrowing power onto a credit card. Yet it’s also part of a wave of fintech lenders that have been expanding rapidly this year. According to data compiled by Cross River Bank, in the second quarter of 2025, fintech lenders Upstart, SoFi and Affirm grew their loan originations by 154%, 64% and 43%, respectively, versus the second quarter of 2024.
Have a story tip? Contact Jeff Kauflin at [email protected] or on Signal at jeff.273.
Americans today have $1.2 trillion in outstanding credit card debt, and most people carry a balance from one month to the next, paying an average interest rate of 21%. Sadi Khan, Aven’s 40-year-old cofounder and CEO, says Aven’s average interest rate is just 10% to 11%—understandable, since its loans are secured by borrowers’ homes. He makes a bold claim: he wants to cut Americans’ interest payments in half and “to drive the single largest change in the cost of capital in American history.”
Khan has focused on making Aven fast–people can get approved for an Aven home equity line of credit (HELOC) in 15 minutes or less, compared with a month for traditional HELOCs. To do that, Aven has added features like on-demand digital notarization, removing the need for an in-person notary.
The 79-person startup has annualized revenue of more than $200 million a year, Forbes estimates, and isn’t profitable. It had 33,000 customers as July 2024. Khan says the company has tripled the size of its customer base over the past year but declined to provide an updated customer total. Aven is now available in 41 U.S. states.
The primary reasons why people take out Aven loans, which offer limits ranging from $5,000 to $400,000, is for home improvement projects, debt consolidation and other large expenses. And the frightening thing about them, like all HELOCs, is that if you can’t pay your bill, you could lose your house. Khan says the company targets people with FICO credit scores of about 730 and that the number of Aven customers who are delinquent on their payments or have defaulted on their loans is in line with that of traditional HELOCs.
According to the Federal Reserve, 1.15% of HELOC borrowers were at least 90 days delinquent on their loans as of the second quarter of 2025, a steep jump from 0.52% the year prior. Aven’s delinquencies haven’t risen as much over the same period, according to Khan. (By comparison, 6.9% of consumers were delinquent on their credit card payments in the second quarter of 2025, down slightly from 7.18% the year prior.) Khan adds that some Aven customers with a balance of less than $10,000 are eligible to enroll in “foreclosure protection,” where they’re given at least a year to repay their loan if they run into financial trouble.
Beyond HELOCs, Aven is now expanding into mortgage refinancing. So far, Aven has done less than a dozen cash-out refinances, where consumers typically take out a larger mortgage and pocket the difference in cash. It aims to speed up the approval process to 10 days or less.
Read the full article here