Former Googlers’ Upstart Raises $5.9M to Back Young People

A platform for investing in young people to help them pursue entrepreneurship and other opportunities is not a Google-like business. And a company called Upstart, founded by a team of former Googlers to arrange these investments, is not yet having Google-like success. (Not to set the bar high or anything.)

In its first year, Upstart has arranged just over $1 million in funding to 83 participants from 135 backers, and repayments have already begun.

But Upstart says its ambitions, and the potential for the idea of “human capital,” are much bigger than that.

“The productive abilities of people represent all the potential of the economy. If we allow people to start investing in income potential, that’s the mother of all asset classes,” said Upstart CEO Dave Girouard in a recent interview.

(Girouard, 47, was formerly president of Google Enterprise and VP of Google Apps; and Upstart co-founder Anna Mongayt, 32, ran Google’s enterprise customer programs and Gmail Consumer Operations. A third co-founder, 22-year-old Paul Gu, was part of Peter Thiel’s 20under20 drop-out-of-college program.)

Having judged its early trials as successful, Upstart has now raised $5.9 million from new investors including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff and Scott Banister, after raising $1.75 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, CrunchFund and Mark Cuban last year.

The company currently hand-reviews applications, rejecting about half of them so far, and running income-potential analysis to determine each person’s investment terms (for instance, $4,000 upfront might promise a return of 1 percent of a person’s income over the next decade). Almost everyone who made it through that process so far has raised a minimum of $10,000, according to Upstart.

So how does Upstart turbocharge its own growth? Girouard said he hopes to fund thousands of applicants within the next year, and that it would take a combination of getting the word out, product improvements like better mentorship communication, and U.S. law changes like the yet-to-be-implemented JOBS Act that would make it easier to publicly solicit investment.