Vittana
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Vittana was a Seattle nonprofit founded in 2007 by former Amazon employee Kushal Chakrabarti. Modeled on Kiva, it let people lend money online to students in developing countries: its 35 microfinance partners in 17 countries disbursed student microloans, while Vittana raised the capital through its crowdfunding website, investment funds and partnerships. Backers included Vinod Khosla and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton.
02 / Vittana FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
After five years and several approaches, Vittana never found a robust business model that could survive without philanthropic capital. The team had promised donors that charity was only a temporary bridge, and when neither of the two tested revenue models could fund the $2 million annual operating budget needed to launch and support new programs, the board-backed team made the painful decision to wind down as a standalone organization. It was not simply out of money: the board would have funded a plan the team believed in, but no sustainable path to its goal of sparking student-loan markets materialized.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Vittana was founded.
- Operations ended
Vittana ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
P2P student microloans for developing countries
- 02
35 microfinance partners across 17 countries
- 03
No sustainable model without philanthropy
- 04
Wound down as standalone org in 2014; Kiva took over portfolio