Climb Credit.

Climb Credit lends money to people who want new careers - and it does so in a corner of education that big banks largely ignore. Instead of financing bachelor's degrees, the New York fintech underwrites coding bootcamps, trucking academies, healthcare certificates, cosmetology courses, heavy-equipment training and aviation programs. The through-line is simple: these are shorter, cheaper programs that can move a graduate's income quickly, and Climb wants to fund the ones that actually do.

The company was founded in 2014 on a contrarian read of the student-debt problem. The barrier to retraining, its founders argued, was rarely motivation - it was cash flow. People wanted to switch careers but couldn't front thousands of dollars in tuition, and their thin or blemished credit files disqualified them from traditional loans. Climb set out to fix the money so the ambition already there could do its work.

To do that, Climb built its own way of judging risk. Rather than lean on a single FICO number, the company's proprietary Climb Credit Score weighs more than 150 data points to form a holistic picture of an applicant. The result is that a would-be welder or software developer with a short credit history can still qualify - a population that conventional underwriting tends to reject on sight.

Most lenders get paid whether a borrower's education leads anywhere or not. Climb's design deliberately breaks that pattern. Because partner schools share the default risk and must supply outcomes data before they can offer Climb financing, everyone at the table has a reason to care whether graduates land better jobs. Schools that join report enrollment increases north of 20% and carry zero liability on defaults - the risk-sharing sits between the school and Climb, not on the student alone.

That outcomes orientation shows up in the numbers Climb points to: borrowers reported an average 57% salary increase after completing their programs. It also shows up in what Climb chooses not to fund. A program that can't demonstrate it improves earning potential simply doesn't get onto the platform.

Climb operates as a two-sided marketplace: on one side, the individuals enrolling in skill-based programs; on the other, the 100-plus vocational schools that offer those programs. It makes money from interest and fees on the loans it originates and services, plus origination arrangements with partner schools. The capital to lend has come in part from institutional backers - notably a $50 million lending-capital commitment from the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group in 2019, alongside a $9.8 million Series A led by Third Prime and New Markets Venture Partners.

In the broader market, Climb sits alongside private student lenders like Sallie Mae and Ascent and income-share providers - but it stakes out a narrower position. Rather than compete on degree financing, it concentrates on non-degree career training and underwrites on results and 150+ signals instead of pedigree. That places it squarely in fintech's move from credential-based to outcomes-based lending, where the question shifts from “where did you study?” to “did the training pay off?”