Revival

Consumer Debt is a nearly $15T problem. For centuries the name of the game has been squeezing every penny you can get out of borrowers. We think there's no money in punishing poor people, and we wouldn't even if there was. We take huge cuts on getting them out of debt to invest in our relationship with the borrowers so that we can grow them into building wealth. Through charging fair fees along that journey, we stand to make way more than we could have ever charged them upfront by also working as a tool that they can use to build wealth.

Our platform intercepts debt in bulk at a discount from lenders before it gets sold to institutional investors or debt collectors and passes savings as high as 90% on to consumers. Success for Revival will mean everyday borrowers have full access to the entire secondary loan market and will be able to secure and eliminate their own debt without regard to the size of the lender, their credit profile or payment record.

92% of our customer base are low-income, credit challenged individuals. More than 8 in 10 of our consumers identify as African American or Latino. We get connected to individuals through the portfolios of debt that they are included in. Through helping them to buy out their debt, we are able to create net gains of $1,500 and a credit score increase between 5-15 points for consumers in 3-6 months where with competitive platforms; a comparable outcome would take nearly a year, if it was achieved at all.

I left grad school with nearly $100,000 in student debt. My recommended monthly payments were more than my monthly rent, and I live in New York City. That level of debt felt and debilitating. It eventually pushed me into the fight to cancel student debt. I went on to design the websites for both Student Debt Crisis and the Debt Collective; the two organizations leading the fight, and the organizations behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen Chuck Schumer's plan to cancel student debt. I also personally served as a United States Senate panelist on the issue of student debt.

$2.2M in Debt Eliminated

4,261 Beneficiaries

$1,500+ Net Worth Increase

5-25pt Credit Score Increase across Borrowers Involved

The biggest challenges that we need help solving through Solve is Go-to-Market challenges. Looking across our industry, one of the biggest challenges in serving low-income and credit challenged individuals is how much you have to spend in order to get them to use your product. We could benefit from leveraging the Solve community to create more channel partnerships because the cheaper it is for us to get in front of consumers who need our services, the faster we can scale.

What makes our solution innovative is we use technology to open up and democratize access to a side of the loan business that banks and investors like to keep hidden. The loan sale side of the business is ultimately what leads to wealth being drained from communities that depend on loans to get by and our solution helps consumers recapture the funds they had been going to loan holders using readily available consumer loan data.

At Revival, we all got tired of surface level solutions to the problem of being in debt. Teaching consumers, and shaving pennies from all your transactions and funneling it to debt can only have a marginal impact. We know because everyone on our team has put in the time learning, and gone through the experience of being charged more in services fees for platforms that were supposed to help us.

We go after the source of the problem. Ownership of debt as an investment. In disrupting the ownership stronghold, we put money back in the hands of borrowers who truly didn't have it to begin with, and give them an actual chance at prosperity.

Our impact goal for the next year is to get over $5M in debt eliminated. Within the next 5 years, we hope to reach over $1B in debt eliminated and continue or work to help people escape loans with predatory interest rates through connections with our community partners to create an expected savings of over $100M.

Our core technology is our predictive algorithms on loan pricing. We take data from more than 20 years of debt brokerage experiences to give consumers the insight and volume needed to eliminate their debt at discounted rates that have been historically reserved for institutional debt buyers.

2 Full Time

1 Contractor

1 Advisor

2 years

We strive to find leaders from all backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations. The problem we aim to solve impacts marginalized communities the most so we privilege their lived experiences in the products we ship and compensate them equitably for the value that they bring to our company.

For every transaction that happens on our platform, we take a standard brokerage fee for enabling the transaction and unlocking savings that would not otherwise exist for consumers. To help make our product more accessible to the most vulnerable consumers, we have added payment plans and enabled users to lock in discounts on their debt with payments as small as $25.

Our fundraising strategy is to finish out and institutional angel round of $1M to perfect our platform and raise more traditional venture capital as we plan to scale.To date, we have raised more than $400K from some of the best investors and impact organizations in the world like a16z, the Tides Foundation and the Robin Hood Foundation.