Amitay Kalmar is driving innovation in fintech so that his customers can drive to work. The founder of Boston-based Lendbuzz, he has been helping people without credit get behind the wheels of new rides for a decade—and he’s doing so because he was once in their position, and knows how hard it can be.
“I applied for a credit card and was denied multiple times because I didn’t have a credit history,” he said in a 2021 profile. “That was the seed that was planted at the time, acknowledging the system is flawed and does not serve many people that are deserving borrowers.”
Previously an employee at Deutsche Bank, the graduate of the Sloan School of Management at MIT hasn’t let his foot off the gas after founding Lendbuzz in 2015. In January, the company completed a $262 million asset-backed securitization, its ninth such move since starting the program in 2021. To date, the company has $1.9 billion in asset-backed securities.
Kalmar wouldn’t have it any other way, which may be surprising on the surface, because by his own admission, he’s not a “car guy.” But when he moved to Boston from his native Israel, his lack of a FICO score presented hurdles he hadn’t before encountered: he was unable to get a credit card, an auto loan, or a mortgage, as he recalled in a 2024 interview, and quickly realized that getting an auto loan was the first step for people in his predicament to build the necessary creditworthiness to sustain an American life.
For an auto loan, “You can work with your debit card,” he said. “It’s [also] quicker to get access to credit cards. Mortgages come at a much later stage in your life. Your first house, you're going to buy it usually after you bought one, two, three cars. So if you solve auto, you solve the biggest part of that problem.”
The Catch-22, of course, was getting the initial auto loan. Instead of using FICO scores, Lendbuzz uses thousands of data points to determine creditworthiness, opening the doors to auto loans for the many, many people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get them. Lendbuzz leverages AI, and the results speak for themselves, with the company having survived a difficult period for auto loan delinquencies following the pandemic.
With 40 to 50 million American adults lacking a FICO score, Lendbuzz’s business looks to continue to grow over its next 10 years. With Kalmar at the wheel, it’s a safe bet.
