She lends money to teenagers no bank will touch, and reads their report cards instead of their parents' credit scores.
A 19-year-old with a 3.8 GPA, a part-time job, and a single mother earning $38,000 a year walks into the American credit system. The system asks one question: who is your cosigner? Jeannie Tarkenton built a company to ask a better one.
Tarkenton is the founder and chief executive of Funding U, an Atlanta fintech that makes student loans to high-achieving, low-income undergraduates without a cosigner and without leaning on a FICO score. Instead of a credit file thin enough to read a newspaper through, her underwriting model looks at the things a striving student actually controls: grades, course load, persistence, internships, the trajectory of a life still being built.
It is a strange bet, and a deliberate one. Traditional lenders treat an 18-year-old as a risk to be priced or a parent to be guaranteed. Funding U treats the student as the asset. Since 2018 the company has deployed well over $125 million to thousands of borrowers, roughly 60% of them the first in their family to attend a four-year college and 40% from households earning under $40,000. The company calls itself the national leader in no-cosigner student lending, chasing a market north of $30 billion a year.
The headline number she cares about is not the loan volume. It is what happens after: about 90% of her borrowers graduate on time, and more than 80% land a job within a year of finishing, at an average starting salary of $64,500. The loan, in her telling, is not the product. The diploma is.
That distinction shapes everything. A lender that profits from default writes one kind of contract. A lender whose entire return depends on a borrower finishing school and getting hired writes another. Funding U is structurally rooting for the kid, because the kid graduating is the business model. The interests line up in a way the credit-card industry has spent decades arranging so that they don't.
The borrowers she serves are the ones the formal system quietly routes around. They have done the hard part - the grades, the acceptance, three years of tuition somehow scraped together - and then hit a wall in the final stretch with a few thousand dollars unaccounted for. Federal aid is capped. Private lenders want a cosigner with a credit history and an income, which is precisely what a first-generation, low-income family is least likely to have. The student is left choosing between a 25% credit card and walking away from the degree. Tarkenton calls that the last-gap problem, and she has built a company whose whole reason to exist is to stand in that gap.
The orthodoxy of consumer lending is that a number between 300 and 850 tells you whether a stranger will pay you back. For a teenager with no mortgage, no car loan and no decade of credit-card history, that number is mostly noise, a verdict on the household they happened to be born into rather than the person they are becoming.
Funding U's underwriting runs on proprietary analytics that assess behavior rather than balance sheets. It reads transcripts and internship records, weighs the difficulty of a major against the grades earned, and models the likelihood that this particular student finishes and earns. Tarkenton, who is loud about her dislike of either/or framing, built the loan as a refusal of the usual binary: you are not either a safe borrower or a charity case.
There is a quieter ambition layered under the lending. Funding U also functions as a data and intelligence platform - a way for banks and other institutions to engage younger borrowers and make better decisions about a cohort the rest of the industry treats as a black box. Every loan that performs teaches the model something about which signals actually predict a student finishing strong. The company is, in effect, building a credit language for people who don't yet speak the old one.
None of this would matter if the loans went bad. The proof is in the cohort: roughly nine in ten of her borrowers graduate on schedule, and the overwhelming majority are working within a year. Those are not the numbers of a charity hoping for the best. They are the numbers of an underwriting thesis that turned out to be right - that a striving 19-year-old with good grades and no cosigner is a better credit than the system assumed, if only someone bothered to look at the evidence the student was already generating.
Princeton, sophomore year. Tarkenton walks in to find her roommate in tears. Money has run out, and the roommate is about to drop out of school.
Tarkenton did the obvious thing, which is to say she did the thing almost nobody does. She arranged a $1,000 loan from her own father so her friend could stay enrolled. "I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney," she later told Fortune. "Like, that's just what you do for friends."
The roommate was MacKenzie Scott, who would go on to a fortune measured in the tens of billions and a second career giving much of it away. The thousand-dollar loan that kept her in school has aged into one of the better-returning gestures in the history of dorm-room generosity, and not because it was repaid with interest.
Decades later, when Tarkenton built a company premised on the idea that a small loan at the right moment changes a trajectory, Scott showed up on the other side of the table. She now provides junior, concessionary capital to Funding U, covering roughly 30 cents of every dollar lent while banks supply the rest. Tarkenton is careful to strip the halo off it: this is not philanthropy. Funding U is a company. Scott gets her money back.
Tarkenton did not arrive at lending from a trading desk. She arrived from the unglamorous middle of Atlanta's education world. She was Director of Development at Literacy Action, the founding Director of Admissions at the Atlanta Girls' School, and a strategic consultant at the Rollins Center for Early Literacy inside the Atlanta Speech School.
That decade handed her a thesis: the gap that mattered most was not tutoring or test prep or even admissions. It was the few thousand dollars of "last-gap" funding standing between an achieving student and a finished degree, the shortfall that turns a near-graduate into a dropout with debt and no diploma. The only products on offer for that gap were high-interest credit cards. She decided to build a better one.
She brought an English degree to the problem. Tarkenton graduated from Princeton cum laude in English Literature and American Studies, and before that was the first alumna trustee of The Lawrenceville School. The credit model came later, and from the same instinct that wrote the $1,000 check: bet on the person.
Her years in literacy work also gave her a particular way of seeing leverage. She points to the research that maternal education correlates more strongly than almost anything with outcomes downstream - infant mortality, child literacy, employment, the odds of escaping poverty. Educate one person and the effect compounds across a family and a generation. That is the multiplier she is underwriting. A loan that finishes one degree is not a single transaction; in her framing it is a wager on a chain reaction.
It also explains why she resists the pressure to pick a lane. Investors and observers keep wanting Funding U to be one thing - a charity, a fintech, an impact fund, a bank. Tarkenton's answer is to blend the capital structures instead: concessionary money that can absorb first risk sitting alongside ordinary bank debt, so the loans stay affordable without pretending the economics aren't real. The same person who refuses binary thinking in a meeting refuses it on the balance sheet.
I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney. Like, that's just what you do for friends.
I fight and resist and tell my team to resist any binary conversations or a binary way of thinking.
The need to get last-gap funding for school is not fun. But it's a necessary tool to get something you really highly value.
Funding U is a company, after all - and Scott will eventually get her money back.