Tenet EV Financing

The Scene

A loan that knows it's a car

Somewhere in a credit union back office, an EV buyer gets approved before lunch. The car is electric. The loan, for once, knows it. The monthly payment is lower than the dealership quoted, a slice of the principal is parked until the very end, and the whole thing was funded in under 24 hours. None of that is normal. All of it is Tenet.

Tenet runs the financial plumbing behind that approval. It is a financial-technology company headquartered at 75 Greene Street in SoHo, with roughly 94 people and a single, slightly stubborn conviction: an electric vehicle is not a gas car with a battery taped on, so it should not be financed like one. From that conviction grew the first U.S. consumer lending platform built exclusively for EVs, and, more recently, an engine that lets other lenders do the same.

The Problem They Saw

The auto loan never got the memo

The auto-lending system was designed around a depreciating lump of steel and an internal combustion engine. It assumes the car loses value on a predictable curve, that fuel is somebody else's problem, and that the buyer's relationship with the vehicle ends at the gas pump. Electric vehicles break most of those assumptions. They depreciate differently. They come with charging costs that can land on a utility bill instead of a fuel receipt. They are, in lending terms, a different animal pretending to fit in the same cage.

That mismatch has a price, and consumers pay it. Higher monthly payments. Slower approvals. Lenders who treat a Model 3 with the same risk model they'd aim at a fifteen-year-old sedan. For a market the entire planet is supposedly racing toward, the financing was curiously stuck in the past - which is the polite way of saying nobody had bothered.

The Founders' Bet

From mining bitcoin to financing cars

In 2021, three founders - Alex Liegl, Andreas Wallendahl, and Paul Sebexen - placed a bet that the EV loan is its own asset class, and that whoever modeled it correctly first would own a category nobody else was looking at. Liegl, the CEO, arrived with an unusual resume: he had previously founded Layer1, a U.S. bitcoin-mining company built around renewable energy. He went, in other words, from mining coins with clean power to financing the cars that run on it. Wallendahl, the COO, rounds out the operating side.

The bet was contrarian in the way good bets usually are: boring on the surface, structural underneath. Anyone can offer a green car loan with a leaf in the logo. Tenet's wager was that the math of an EV - resale behavior, charging economics, the bundle of car plus charger plus battery - could be turned into a genuinely cheaper, faster product. Build the model, and the lower payment is not a marketing gimmick. It's an output.

The Product

What you can actually do with it

Strip away the mission language and Tenet does three concrete things. First, it finances and refinances any electric vehicle - Teslas very much included - with competitive rates, fast approval, and a structure that lets borrowers defer up to 25% of principal until the loan matures. That deferral trick is borrowed more from real-estate finance than from the auto lot, and it's how the monthly number comes down.

Second, through TenetConnect, it folds in smart charging that trims charging costs on a customer's utility bill - the rare loan that quietly tries to pay you back a little. Third, and increasingly the main event, Tenet has turned its origination and underwriting stack into lending-as-a-service: a 100% digital engine that credit unions, nonbank lenders, and other financiers can plug into to originate vetted, high-intent EV loans without rebuilding any of it themselves.

The Proof

Receipts, not adjectives

A thesis is only as good as the institutions willing to bet on it. Tenet has collected a few. New York Green Bank wrote a $25 million warehouse facility, calling it a first of its kind - a public green bank treating an EV-loan startup like infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Energy invited Tenet to submit a Part II application under its Title 17 loan program, which is the federal government's way of saying it noticed.

The clearest receipt came from Service Credit Union. Plugged into Tenet's lender network, it added more than 700 new members and avoids roughly 160 tons of CO2 every month. That second number is the tell: Tenet reports its results partly in carbon avoided, not just loans booked. The KeySavvy partnership, meanwhile, made the messy private-party used-EV market financeable, with loans funding within 24 hours instead of the usual 3-4 business days.

The Mission

The car is just the first product

Tenet calls the EV a wedge, and means it. The longer plan is an all-in-one financial platform for the electric home: not only cars, but chargers, solar panels, and battery storage, all financed through the same logic that makes the loan cheaper when the asset is clean. The argument underneath is almost annoyingly simple - the climate transition should not cost more per month. If anything, done right, it should cost less. Tenet wants that discount built into the loan rather than bolted on as a rebate.

The shift to lending-as-a-service is the same idea, scaled. Rather than become the one bank everyone uses, Tenet aims to become the engine inside many of them - credit unions, nonbank lenders, subprime financiers - each issuing EV loans on rails Tenet maintains. Less flag-planting, more infrastructure. The unglamorous version of changing an industry, which is usually the version that works.

Why It Matters Tomorrow

The boring layer of the energy transition

Charts of EV adoption tend to feature batteries, chargers, and charismatic cars. They rarely feature loan documents. Yet most people will not buy an electric vehicle with cash, which means the financing layer quietly decides how fast the transition actually happens. Build that layer well and the monthly payment, not the press release, is what moves a buyer off gas. Build it badly and the cleanest car on the lot still loses to the cheapest payment.

Tenet's bet is that this unglamorous layer is where the next decade gets decided. If EV loans really are their own asset class - priced, modeled, and funded on their own terms - then the company that mapped them first sits underneath a very large, very electric market. Skeptics will note the road is long, the rates environment is unforgiving, and incumbents are not asleep forever. All true. The counterpoint is that someone has to make the math work, and so far Tenet keeps showing its work.

Back in that credit union back office, the EV buyer drives off before the afternoon. The loan was approved before lunch, the payment came in lower than the dealer quoted, and a small share of the principal sits patiently at the end of the term. It still isn't normal. That's the point. Tenet is trying to make it ordinary.

Watch & Learn

See it in motion