Stride Funding
“Can an outcomes-based education lender become the connective tissue between employers, schools, and talent by embedding education financing into HR and workforce platforms?”
Founded as Stride Funding circa 2019-2020, the company initially disrupted student lending through Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs), using proprietary ML models to underwrite students based on future earnings potential rather than credit history. The company evolved from direct ISA issuance to a program-manager model, enabling educational institutions to fund ISAs using their own capital. By 2025, the company rebranded to Clasp, shifting its go-to-market toward employers seeking to attract and retain talent through education financing benefits, effectively repositioning from a pure student lender to an HR-tech-adjacent fintech platform tackling student debt and workforce development simultaneously.