Jared Hecht is an American entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of Fundera, an online small business lending aggregator as well as group messaging app GroupMe.
[3] While a student at Columbia, he was the managing director and publisher for the university's student-written guidebook, Inside New York.
[8] One of Hecht's early hires at GroupMe, Zach Sims, also a Columbia alumnus, went on to found the online code-learning platform Codecademy.
[9] Hecht later became an angel investor and invested in companies such as Sweetgreen, TransferWise, and Flatiron Health.
[10][11] In October 2013, he launched Fundera, an online broker that helps small businesses get loans from non-bank lenders, after seeing a family member struggle with bank loans, and raised a total of $18.9 million for his platform from investors such as Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, David Tisch, and more.