Why I Joined Aven: Building the ‘Machine Bank’

Over my career, I have launched products at Meta, Uber and Tesla as a product manager. I have also founded two companies, raising more than $30 million, and selling one.

I recently joined Aven because it’s like no other company. We have a clear shot at building the world’s most efficient banking platform and drastically lowering the cost of capital for all. We are already well on our way with an unrivaled pace of execution.

Here is why I joined Aven as a product manager and why you should join the company, too.

What is Aven?

Our mission is to provide people with the lowest cost and most convenient access to capital. We are doing this by building a machine-run banking platform that operates 24/7, with full transparency, audit-ability, and built-in compliance.

In just three years after the first product launch, Aven has become the world’s most efficient credit card company measured by revenue per employee. With fewer than 80 employees, a $2.2 billion valuation, and partnerships with some of the world’s best investors like Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and General Catalyst, we are just getting started.

Aven is solving a trillion-dollar problem

Americans are drowning in over $1 trillion in credit card debt and pay over $200 billion in interest every year. For half a century, technology has made every other part of our lives better and cheaper, except credit card interest rates.

We tackled this problem head-on. Our first product, the Aven Equity Visa Card, cuts this rate in half. It is driving the single biggest change in credit card history.

Aven Equity Visa Card works by giving consumers credit for what they already own. The 1% do this today. They leverage their assets to borrow at a very low cost without selling them.

The vast majority of the credit card debt in the U.S. is held by customers that own assets like homes, cars, stocks, and cryptocurrency. Yet, they rarely access their equity because doing so is expensive, opaque, and slow. Aven has created the first credit card backed by home equity that consumers can acquire in just 15 minutes to cut their credit card interest rate by half.

Since launch three years ago, we’ve captured 1% of the U.S. HELOC market, and we are on track to hit $1 billion in annual revenue within a few years. 

Building a banking platform for the AI era

Home equity is just the start. Our strategy is to build consumer-facing financial products using technical innovation to radically reduce the cost of the transaction, reducing the cost of capital to consumers in the process.

We do not think of technology as something that we do on the side – it is everything we do. We are building the core infrastructure for the machine-banking age: an operating system that automates banking functions end-to-end. Already, Aven’s technology can:

1. Make underwriting decisions
2. Fulfill compliance checks
3. Verify income and personal records directly
4. Sign, originate, and service financial contracts
5. Continuously improve to get smarter, faster, and cheaper over time

We built remote robotic-signing technology so we can offer digital notary sessions for our customers in states requiring “wet” signatures. We run weekly multi-model rankings across the entire U.S. population to personalize marketing, saving millions in acquisition costs and growing billions in balances. And like NASA’s shuttle systems, we run independent agents that scan every interaction every four hours to ensure adherence to all federal and state compliance requirements.

The global consumer debt now exceeds $60 trillion, touching nearly every part of the financial system. At Aven, we are building banking as an end-to-end computational system—one that learns and improves with every customer, model, and data point. This approach lets our technical depth compound with scale, enabling us to continuously drive down the cost of capital for consumers.

Who you will work with at Aven

Aven scales through technology. Everyone is expected to produce outsized impact and has the ownership to do so. If you are ambitious and want your impact to be rewarded, Aven is the right place; it is why I joined.

Here you will work with extraordinary technical talent, including: 

1. The first applied computer vision leads at Facebook
2. Creators of Microsoft’s fastest C++ compilers
3. Founding engineers of Microsoft Azure
4. Founding designers of Cash App at Square 

We work hard because we have a real shot at building a generational company that reshapes banking for the AI era. The greatest companies emerge when the right team, the right product, and the right market come together—and we believe we have all three.

For the builders that want to push the boundaries of what’s possible in machine learning and AI, software engineering, and financial technology, and want to work with incredibly sharp, mission-driven people: Aven is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with unparalleled impact and scale. 

Come join us.

Sisun