Jonathan Kelfer

As the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Orchard Platform, Jonathan Kelfer has been instrumental in developing technology solutions that connect institutional investors with loan originators in the marketplace lending sector. Orchard Platform, founded in 2013, provides a centralized marketplace where these parties can explore and evaluate opportunities for funding, buying, and selling loans. The company's mission is to build the systems that will allow marketplace lending to efficiently grow into a global financial market. Orchard enables institutional investors and investment managers to allocate capital to marketplace lending, with best practices, manager identification, and portfolio benchmarking while also providing modeling, order management, reporting & analytics, and strategic access to supply. Under Kelfer's leadership, Orchard Platform has developed software that amasses and analyzes data from a wide range of marketplace loan originators, providing order management, benchmarking, and other tools to analyze loan performance. The platform arms institutional investors with the ability to easily scale their loan portfolios and gain insight into their performance over time. Additionally, Orchard benefits marketplace lenders by raising their profiles among investors and expanding their reach to new, diversified sources of capital. In 2018, Orchard Platform was acquired by Kabbage, a financial technology company specializing in small business lending. This acquisition allowed Orchard to continue its mission of providing transparent, technologically optimized platforms for loan originators and institutional investors to connect, evaluate potential deals, and move forward with multiple types of transactions. The combined entity aims to further innovate and streamline the marketplace lending industry, leveraging Orchard's expertise in data analytics and Kabbage's capabilities in small business lending.