Crowdfunding Student Loans … With A Twist

Next week, a startup called Pave will be launching a new group of New York “Rising Stars,” who will be able to take advantage of the company’s unusual investment program designed to help individuals, including recent college graduates, get their careers off the ground.

(Jump to 0:40) “We have a situation where many who are graduating every year with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt,” Pave co-founder Oren Bass told Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster in a podcast interview this week. “And that’s prohibiting them from going into careers of their choosing.”

As a result, many recent graduates wind up having to pay large monthly sums toward settling their student loans of credit card debt, he added.

Investing In The Future

(Jump to 1:00) “What we’re doing is providing Millennial talent with a new way to actually fund either their careers or their studies, or even to finance some of their student debt,” Bass said. “We do that by actually letting them raise money from groups of older and successful individuals in exchange for a small percentage of their future income.”

At its core, Pave’s objective is to provide a means for talented and motivated individuals to accelerate their careers, and to provide experienced successful professionals to helps groups they care about to similarly succeed.

Pave, which was founded in March 2012 and is based in New York, has as participants about 7,000 registrants, 5,500 of whom are applicants for funding, called “The Talent,” plus about 1,500 backers looking to invest in the talent register, Bass said.

The average backer commitment is about $2,500 per individual, whose payments back are tied to future income. If they do well, the backer shares in the upside of the talent they invested in, Bass said.

With groups such as the New York Rising Stars launching next week, investments from backers can reach $10,000 per investor, and each individual talent can raise $20,000 to $25,000 each, Bass said.

You can learn more about Pave at The Innovation Project 2014, March 19-20. Get on the list.

You can also hear more about Pave from Bass directly by listening to the full podcast by clicking below.

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