5 questions with ... Upstart Chief Capital Officer and President Sanjay Datta

AI-powered lending platform Upstart on Feb. 10 named Sanjay Datta its president and chief capital officer and the new appointee has his work cut out for him. After a fourth quarter in which Upstart’s auto originations jumped 344.4% year over year to $200 million and total revenue jumped 35.2% YoY to $296.1 million, the company’s plans for capital and operational growth include: Scaling auto loans; Growing its dealership network and increasing the use of Upstart’s lending platform; Expanding relationships with depository institutions and its network of bank and credit union financiers; and Increasing backing from institutional lenders. Datta joined Upstart as chief financial officer in 2019. In addition to his CFO duties, he has spent the past two years “shepherding” capital efforts for the AI-powered lending platform, he said . However, plans to scale the business necessitated adding a person dedicated to expanding capital funding. “The demands of that job have outgrown my ability to do it on the side or as part of a dual job,” he told Auto Finance News. Datta sat down with AFN to discuss his initial goals in his new role and Upstart’s goals for expansion through AI. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. Auto Finance News : What is Upstart’s capital markets strategy heading into 2026? Sanjay Datta: It hasn't really changed. It's just going to scale, but there's really three components to it. One component is engaging with depository lenders such as credit unions and banks that are interested in either generating assets or cross-selling customers, either in their own base, to a product they either don't offer or we can offer very efficiently, or trying to acquire a new lending customer and cross-selling them into their deposit base. Then there is a series of large partnerships that we have struck, predominantly in our core business, which is unsecured lending. Those deals, you could think of them as being with private credit institutions such as Wall Street funds or institutions that tend to have a higher risk tolerance than a regulated depository bank. Our models are pushing the boundaries of underwriting predictiveness, so those are ideal partners to work with. [Editor’s note: In Q4 2025, 70% of auto and home loans were funded by 11 company partners.] And then there's a third prong, which is what you might think of as classic capital markets: issuing structures and securities against the underlying collateral, and bringing those to market in operations where we engage the market, like an asset-backed securitization deal, or maybe some private versions of that. And all three of those continue to be important parts of our strategy, and we're in the process now trying to extend all of those prongs into the new products, auto lending in particular. AFN : What has been the response to auto expansion from your private credit partners? SD : Responses have been really encouraging from a mix of both depository lenders and institutional buyers. Expansion into auto is allowing us to engage with some new counterparties that have a lot of curiosity about us, interest and excitement in understanding what we do and partnering with us. There's the extension of existing partnerships and new relationships that we're creating. There are folks that we work with in the unsecured world, so they know us well. We are extending our relationships into auto, so that's an exciting new opportunity for them, but they obviously have a long history with us and a lot of credibility with us. We also have on the institutional side, some folks who are not active in unsecured lending but more specialized in secured lending, like auto. They know the auto space well, but we're a bit of a new entity for them. And there's a lot of curiosity about us, because obviously we've made a bit of a splash in on the unsecured side. There's a lot of great engagement and desire to learn how we do what we do on the modeling side. AFN : Is Upstart planning to issue an auto ABS deal in 2026? SD : It would be a good target to have an auto ABS issuance inside of the 2026 calendar year, if not early 2027, but that's an estimate rather than a guide. The contributions into those ABS deals are not, by and large, coming from our own balance sheet. For Upstart, some amount of the ABS flow is funded by institutional partnerships with private credit institutions, other forward-flow buyers. We then run an ABS shelf, largely on their behalf. It's offered as a liquidity service to the forward-flow buyers that are buying and funding the credit at origination. In auto, similarly, the first thing we're doing is establishing those buying relationships with private credit, with depository institutions, with other forward-flow buyers, such that when we originate credit, it has a home. And as we scale that system, we will plan to start standing up a shelf for auto ABS as well as a liquidity option for the forward-flow buyers. ABS issuance is a little bit sequenced, and you want to have the forward-flow buyers and the investors in place first. But once we have a certain scale there, I think you'll see us definitely as a presence in the auto ABS markets. AFN: What will the new CFO's immediate strategy include? SD : Andrea Blankmeyer , our incoming CFO, will be able to dedicate herself to bringing our finance team to the next level for every function. Right now, we're trying to figure out how to use AI internally to make our processes more scalable and more efficient. Then I will turn my attention external-facing to all these capital providers and dealerships and ensure that we are able to scale funding along with the scaling of the overall platform. AFN: How will Upstart use AI to streamline consumer-facing processes? SD : There are two threads of how AI comes into play. One of them is unique to us and lending, and it's the historical way we've employed AI. A lot of the friction of lending lies in the verification process, so if you can get good at fraud modeling via AI, you can cut a lot of that process out. The second application is the newer one that I don't think is specific to lending or to us — every company in the world now is trying to figure out how to do things better and more efficiently with AI agents. When we’re servicing customers , they have questions or issues that need troubleshooting. Certainly, the stuff that AI wrote is the same thing being done over and over by someone, but you can automate that cleverly now. We're exploring the world of agentic AI to figure out how we can make touch points more seamless, reduce waiting times, produce more efficient answers and increase standardization across agents compared to different humans who have to be trained. Auto Finance News will present multiple invaluable events for industry professionals in 2026, starting with Auto Finance Summit East and Auto Finance Capital Summit in May. To see event agendas and register, visit autofinance.live .

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5 questions with … Upstart Chief Capital Officer and President Sanjay Datta

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