Aura, a San Francisco, CA-based mission-driven financial technology company that offers affordable loans to hard-working families, received a $10m investment from Prudential Financial (NYSE: Pru).
The company intends to use the funds to scale and provide more loans to more borrowers.
This new funding comes at a time of rapid growth for Aura, in which the company has provided approximately $500 million in loans to more than 350,000 borrowers at over 1,200 partner locations since its founding in 2014. Aura uses technology that goes beyond the credit score to determine borrowers’ ability to repay and enables local businesses to administer credit applications.
Founded in 2012 by James Gutierrez, Kevin Kang, and Randy Wong, Aura is a technology-powered, Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that provides small, affordable loans to working families (underbanked and unbanked) in America. The company has developed a cloud-based lending technology that enables local businesses to submit credit applications for centralized review and approval by its proprietary scoring algorithms.
Loans are made possible by its innovative social bonds program, which enables banks and other financial institutions to invest in loans to low-income individuals, while generating compelling returns.
Currently available in nearly 1,200 locations across California, Texas, Illinois and Arizona, the company has provided hundreds of thousands of credit-building, responsible loans to low-income households since launching in 2014.
In total, Aura has raised over $403 million in social bonds across 21 bond issuances and $100m in equity funding.
FinSMEs
25/06/2019