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Building the world’s first credit card backed by home equity

GP Team Members

  • Jason Lohrentz

    TALENT

  • Bret Reckard

    TALENT

  • Jose Guardado

    TALENT

  • Josh Hernández

    TALENT

  • Kristopher Kostelecky

    TALENT

Milestones

Founded in 2019 Partnered 2020

Founders

Sadi Khan, CEO Murtada Shah Collin Wikman

Aven is building a lower-cost path to consumer credit by pairing the convenience of a credit card with the economics of a home equity line of credit. Its products give consumers access to asset-backed credit without the weeks of paperwork, fees, and friction that have historically defined secured lending. The company is helping consumers build wealth by cutting their interest rates by up to 50% and saving them more than $300 million in interest payments.

Visit aven.com

Rebuilding secured credit for speed

Consumers seeking credit have typically faced a tradeoff: fast but expensive unsecured loans, or lower-cost but cumbersome secured loans, such as traditional HELOCs. Aven solves both with the world’s first credit card backed by home equity—combining credit-card convenience with HELOC rates. Its proprietary machine-banking platform compresses approval from weeks to minutes, with $0 origination fees.

Earning trust through talent

TheGP’s partnership with Aven began with talent. Starting in 2020, TheGP embedded alongside Aven’s leadership team, including CTO Usman Ghani, to help build the senior technical bench behind a highly complex financial product.

Aven needed builders who could operate in regulated financial systems, move quickly, and own end-to-end product development. Over a multi-year engagement, TheGP helped the team identify, evaluate, and close candidates across engineering, data, design, and growth—while giving leadership structured visibility into pipeline, offers, and hiring outcomes.

As Aven scaled, TheGP became an extension of its recruiting function, with a particular focus on senior technical roles.

Talent

  • 14 hires across engagements, including 10 in the first 24 months

  • Hired more than 10% of Aven’s team during the initial engagement

  • Helped close senior technical talent, including a Principal Engineer who was formerly an Engineering Director at Google

  • Supported searches across machine learning, data science, full-stack engineering, backend engineering, design, and growth marketing

Conviction built through execution

The talent work gave TheGP a direct view into Aven’s execution velocity, technical standards, and ability to recruit against a demanding bar. That operating relationship ultimately deepened into a capital partnership, with TheGP investing after years of working alongside the team.

Capital

  • Built conviction through a multi-year talent partnership

  • Invested in Aven’s Series C

  • Continued partnership as Aven scaled into one of the fastest-growing credit card companies in history

Impact

“We’re a very technical team with high standards, and TheGP has grown our engineering team with quality and consistency, outpacing all other options for hiring.” - Sadi Khan, co-founder and CEO

Highlights

  • $2.2B valuation

  • $4B+ in credit lines issued

  • 100,000+ customers