The six-year-old fintech offers personal loans, a checking account and a credit card (paying 1.5% to 3% cash back) that also functions like a personal loan: you can get a credit line ranging from $500 to $25,000, have a fixed deadline to pay it off and can make payments in equal monthly installments. In 2022, Upgrade launched a new card that lets customers toggle between paying for items as a debit or a credit purchase and to set rules–such as smaller purchases should always be processed as debit transactions. At the end of 2022, it had 2.2 million customers, up from 1.25 million at the end of 2021.
<p>Funding: $587 million from Coatue, DST, Union Square Ventures and others.
</p><p>Latest valuation: $6.3 billion.
</p><p>Bona fides: In 2022, it had $680 million in revenue and $80 million in net profit. The year prior, revenue was $410 million.
</p><p>Cofounders: CEO Renaud Laplanche, 52, founder and former CEO of online lender LendingClub; CFO Jeff Bogan, 43; head of investor group Adelina Grozdanova, 39; head of cards and loans Matt Wierman, 51; chief information officer Visar Nimani, 48.</p>
HQ: San Francisco, California, United States