Presta

Presta is a digital lending infrastructure company based in Cleveland, Ohio, serving banks, credit unions and other lenders that originate loans to small and medium-sized businesses. Its platform consolidates the full loan lifecycle — outreach and CRM, application intake, underwriting, closing, servicing including disbursements and monthly payment collection, and compliance and performance reporting — into a single system, replacing workflows that lenders typically run across Excel, email, Salesforce, Dropbox, DocuSign and point lending tools.

Underwriting is performed on-platform through a spreadsheet-like interface for building financial models and generating formatted credit memos. Reporting includes premade compliance and performance reports as well as custom reports drawing on data captured across the entire process. The company markets these capabilities as addressing data re-entry between systems, borrower confusion from multiple tools, and piecemeal manual reporting.

At its 2023 launch, Presta cited a market in which thousands of lenders originate more than $650 billion in small business loans annually while nearly 60% of community banks — a primary originator of such loans — do not offer online applications. Presta builds on the founders' prior company, The Opportunity Exchange, an equity investment marketplace for economic development projects that was acquired by competitor Bludot.

Founding story

Presta was founded in 2022 by Leopoldo Peña (CEO) and Peter Truog. The pair previously co-founded The Opportunity Exchange, launched in 2019, an equity investment marketplace that helped cities connect local businesses to equity investors; after operating projects across most of the United States it was acquired by competitor Bludot. Peña, originally from Caracas, Venezuela, holds a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, is a Venture for America fellow, and was earlier part of the founding team of mobile voting platform Votem. He is based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Business model

Presta sells software to lending institutions, providing an all-in-one platform that replaces the collection of separate tools (spreadsheets, CRM, e-signature, document storage and email) lenders otherwise use across the loan lifecycle. The platform spans outreach, CRM, application intake, underwriting, closing, servicing/disbursements, payment collection and reporting, positioning Presta as the system of record for a lender's loan operations.

Software platform revenue characterized as recurring.

Traction

Presta states it is used by lenders across the United States and reports customer-level results including 2.5x faster application completion time, four hours saved per month on payment invoicing, and 2x quarter-over-quarter growth in applications received. Its launch announcement noted successful integrations with banks and credit unions. Headcount was approximately five as of February 2024.

Latest developments

Following its March 2023 launch and pre-seed round, Presta continued to market its end-to-end origination-through-servicing platform to U.S. lenders, reporting roughly five employees as of early 2024 and a headcount range of 1-10.