CommonBond
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| Private | |
| Industry | Financial Services |
| Founded | November 2011 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
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Key people
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David Klein (CEO) Morgan Edwards (CFO) Robb Granado (COO) Vinayak Gurjar (Chief Risk Officer) Phil DeGisi (Chief Marketing Officer) |
| Products | Student loans |
| Website | commonbond |
CommonBond is a marketplace lender that lowers the cost of student loans for borrowers and provides financial returns to investors. The company refinances graduate and undergraduate student loans for graduates of over 2,000 universities, saving the average borrower over $14,000 over the life of the loan. CommonBond also provides in-school loans to current MBA students at 20 programs in the United States. The company, which launched nationally in September 2013, is on track to fund or refinance more than $500 million in student loans by the end of 2015.
CommonBond was founded in November 2012 by David Klein, Michael Taormina, and Jessup Shean, who met at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School MBA program. The impetus for initiating the company was the founders' frustration with the lack of affordable loan options to fund their own graduate school education.
For their business proposal, the trio was accepted to the highly selective Wharton Venture Initiation Program, which serves as a start-up incubator. After deciding to pilot their model at Wharton, the group focused on fundraising during the summer of 2012. By the company's launch in November 2012, CommonBond had raised $3.5 million; $2.5 million had been invested by Wharton alumni and another $1 million of seed funding was provided by a Wharton alumnus in return for a stake in the company. CommonBond's first fund lent to 40 MBA students and recent graduates at Wharton.
CommonBond expanded to 20 MBA programs across the country in September 2013, after announcing it had raised over $100 million in equity and debt financing from investors including Tribeca Venture Partners and The Social+Capital Partnership, as well as industry veterans Vikram Pandit (former CEO of Citigroup), Thomas Glocer (former CEO of Thomson Reuters), and Tom Kalaris (former Vice Chairman of Barclays). In March 2014, CommonBond expanded its student loan refinancing and consolidation programs to graduates of law, medical, and engineering programs across the U.S., in addition to MBA programs.
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