Why I'm building Aven — and why you should join us

A letter from our co-founder and CEO

In every possible structure of society — from nations, to tribes, to families — people try to help their respective societies become healthier and wealthier. Regardless of how we measure this (median health, median wealth, top-line cumulative wealth etc.), we all tend to all prioritize these two objectives.

At Aven, we’re striving to make people wealthier.

Specifically, it is our mission to help people become wealthier by reducing the cost of capital.

Ever since the first credit card was launched in the 1950s, consumers have gone from $0 to over $1 trillion in revolving balances. Today, consumers consistently pay over 20-22% interest rates, and make over $200B in credit card interest payments — and that’s not even including the additional fees paid annually.¹

In the past half-century, the cost of capital has roughly stayed the same. During this time, human progress has accelerated on almost every other front. We invented the internet, social media, mobile phones, and even entirely new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Yet the cost of borrowing to regular consumers just hasn’t seemed to budge.

Source: Federal Reserve Board, Commercial Bank Interest Rate on Credit Card Plans, All Accounts (TERMCBCCALLNS), FRED, June 19, 2025, with proprietary Aven data.

We intend to change that.

Our goal is to cut the cost of capital for consumers by half. Starting in the US, and then globally.

How?

It turns out over 70% of the $1 trillion dollars of credit card debt that US consumers have - is held mostly by “Prime” customers, i.e., people with high credit scores who own assets like homes, cars, stocks, cryptocurrencies, etc. that have a measurable “market value.”

Today, these asset-owning consumers are still using the same standard unsecured credit cards created 75 years ago with sky-high interest rates. Instead, we believe these consumers should strategically leverage their stored value of these assets to massively reduce their cost of capital, often by 50%.

The 1% notoriously do this today. They leverage their assets to borrow at a very low cost without selling them, and while continuing to benefit from value growth. Meanwhile, for most everyday borrowers who want to leverage the value stored in their main asset (their home) to fund home improvements, pay for school, or take a vacation, they must either sell their home or spend thousands of dollars in origination fees and weeks of time to access the value of their home equity.

At Aven, we want to bring the benefits of the 1% to all.

We’ve invented new technologies to unlock the value of their assets - patenting robotic arms, built massively scalable machine learning models, and deployed virtual fax-machine servers to automate income verification. And we’re just getting started.

It turns out that democratizing this benefit involves solving really gnarly technical engineering problems at massive scale and super high precision. We’re able to save customers interest (over $215M saved and counting) and time (compressing a 4-6 week process into a 100% digital one that can be completed in as fast as 15 minutes), while ensuring that every customer we support goes through a rigorous process of income verification to ensure their eligibility.

Over my career, I’ve enjoyed building compilers, search engines, computer-vision based map-geography extraction features, and feed and ad ranking engines at some of the largest companies on earth.

And yet, I believe the opportunity we have by building technology to help reduce the cost of capital for consumers globally is unparalleled in impact, and unrivalled in scale. Total global consumer debt is estimated to be on the order of $62 trillion², affecting nearly every aspect of the global financial system.

Aven has set out to build the world’s lowest APR credit card. And we think that the Aven Home Equity Card is hands down the best credit card for homeowners. Now we’re bringing our technology to bear across other asset classes and everyday consumer financial products: from mortgages, to deposit accounts, and even more asset classes coming, fast.

We’re a super-lean, highly technical team of just over 70 people. We’ve already built and tested credit cards, HELOCs, and mortgage products - and we’re moving even faster on the next wave of products in our pipeline.

Our mission is simple: We want to give people credit for what they own and unlock opportunity for them. For every consumer that joins Aven, we aim to reduce the cost of capital by 50%.

If we succeed - it will mark the single biggest shift in the cost of capital in American history.

Come join us and help reshape how capital works for everyone.

Thanks,
-Sadi

Aven Visa Credit Cards are issued by Coastal Community Bank, pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A., Inc. Aven accounts are made by Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender. NMLS #462289 (NMLS Consumer Access Page). For additional information or complaints to Coastal Community Bank, visit www.federalreserveconsumerhelp.gov. For more information, you can also visit Coastal Community Bank’s privacy policy.

References:

1. Source: WalletHub.

2. Source: IIF Global Debt Monitor.