Paul Zhang

Paul Zhang is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer at Avant, a consumer lending marketplace based in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to his current executive role, he co-founded and served as the CTO of Debteye, an artificial intelligence-driven debt collection platform that secured seed funding and participated in the Y Combinator Summer 2011 cohort. At Avant, Zhang has directed the technical infrastructure and software engineering initiatives that enabled the financial technology company to originate more than $10 billion in loans over its first decade of operation. He has guided the platform's expansion beyond initial credit offerings into a broader suite of personal loan products by integrating machine learning applications into consumer financial services. Zhang's entrepreneurial career focuses on leveraging artificial intelligence and scalable software architecture to build and optimize enterprise financial technology platforms for modern markets.