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ProfileCompany or group

BlueVine

Lender or loan platform

PPP
Type
Company or group
Role
Lender or loan platform
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Individuals and companies whose conduct was challenged or called into question during or after the pandemic. See sources: House fintech report, Dec. 1, 2022 Clyburn letter, May 27, 2021

  • Type: Small-business fintech: invoice factoring, then lines of credit, then digital business banking. In PPP: a Treasury/SBA-approved fintech lender whose loans were overwhelmingly booked through partner banks.
  • Legal entities: Bluevine Capital Inc. (the name that appears in the SBA PPP FOIA lender-fee data). Not a bank: current disclosures state banking services are provided by Coastal Community Bank and the Bluevine line of credit is issued by Celtic Bank.
  • Founded: 2013, by Eyal Lifshitz (signed the March 24, 2020 coalition letter as Founder & CEO; signatories register).
  • HQ: Redwood City, California.
  • CEO: Eyal Lifshitz (co-founder; continuous since founding).
  • Role in PPP: Front-end and bank-partner channel with a late direct-lender lane. BlueVine ran the borrower-facing application, intake checks, and document collection; the loans were booked via partner banks, primarily Celtic Bank and Cross River Bank. BlueVine also held SBA/Treasury approval as a "direct non-bank lender" it received less than a week before the first round ended.

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: a large PPP fintech channel that drew congressional scrutiny but no enforcement action.
  • What BlueVine did for borrowers: an online PPP application marketing loans up to $2 million at 1% with no SBA fees, no collateral, and qualification "within minutes" (May 2020 capture); by February 2021 the page had been rebuilt for first- and second-draw loans and warned that editable PDFs would be rejected by its automated system.
  • Where the loans sat legally: on partner banks. The volume lives inside Celtic's and Cross River's lender-of-record totals.
  • Consequence of that structure: BlueVine appears in no PPPLF data and no facilitator self-aid record: it was not a lender of record at scale, so it had nothing to pledge to the Fed, and no PPP/EIDL borrowing under its own name was found.
  • Oversight status: subject of a May 27, 2021 Clyburn letter and a case study in the December 2022 House fintech-PPP report. No enforcement action or class action against BlueVine has been found.

Before the pandemic

Lifshitz founded BlueVine in Redwood City in 2013 around invoice factoring (advancing cash against small businesses' unpaid invoices) and expanded into lines of credit and, by 2019, digital business banking. Its venture funding history is not documented in the sources we have.

During the pandemic (2020–2022)

The March 24, 2020 coalition letter

Lifshitz signed the fintech coalition letter to congressional leadership (published under OnDeck's banner) on March 24, 2020 as BlueVine's "Founder & CEO." The letter urged Treasury to push relief through non-bank and online lenders. The fintech coalition-letter signatories register classifies BlueVine as Tier 2 — facilitator/agent: it originated and processed applications, but the loans were booked on partner banks.

BlueVine announced SBA/Treasury approval as a "direct non-bank lender" for PPP, and its own impact report added the caveat that it won the ability to participate both as a direct lender and as a non-direct lender through banking partners less than one week before the first PPP round ended. In practice the direct lane stayed tiny (6 loans totaling $29,071 in SBA's PPP loan-level data) and the bank-partner lane carried the program: borrower experience said "Bluevine," while SBA records allocated lender status to Celtic and Cross River. Its lawyers told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in June 2021 that BlueVine "funded/originated six PPP loans as a trial" near the start of the second round and otherwise acted only as a service provider. In August 2021 they wrote: "It was also not a PPP lender." In September 2022 they added that, to BlueVine's knowledge, SBA did not contact it about its fraud controls during the direct-lender application.

The self-reported volume

BlueVine's 2020 impact report claimed more than $4.5 billion in PPP loans to more than 155,000 small businesses in 2020. The impact report said those loans saved "470,000+ jobs"; a December 2020 company blog post gave the same 155,000 businesses and $4.5+ billion and "450,000 jobs." Its February 2021 page cited cumulative funds delivered and customer counts. BlueVine's lawyers told the House Select Subcommittee in June 2021 that it had helped more than 300,000 small businesses receive $8.9 billion in PPP loans, about 75 percent of them sole proprietorships; the Subcommittee's December 2022 report uses the same figures. The same letter said about 22 percent of the roughly 1.67 million applications submitted to BlueVine were approved and funded. The Subcommittee set the PPP total beside BlueVine's own estimate of its pre-pandemic business: about $2 billion for at least 20,000 small businesses over roughly seven years. In the PPP, the report said, BlueVine facilitated "over four times the amount of funds" for "at least 15 times" the number of businesses. All of these are company-side figures, and the partner-bank totals they sit inside are bank-wide; they should not be read as BlueVine-only. Distribution partnerships extended the funnel: DoorDash offered restaurants a BlueVine PPP path in its January 2021 relief program (DoorDash release); Plaid's own case study (cited in the Plaid profile) says BlueVine used its connectivity in PPP underwriting.

Who lent, who processed, who paid

Celtic Bank and Cross River Bank were the SBA lenders on the loans BlueVine processed. By its lawyers' account, BlueVine ran the online application, verified applicants' identities, reviewed their documents and sent approved files to a partner bank by API. The banks filed the SBA lender forms, including Form 1502, "which is required in order to receive lender fees from the SBA"; BlueVine negotiated its own fees with the banks. BlueVine says it sent about 100,000 applications to Celtic and 355,000 to Cross River.

Subcommittee staff asked about a July 2020 amendment to the Cross River contract requiring BlueVine to send Cross River at least 50 percent of its applications. BlueVine's lawyers answered that Cross River "wanted to ensure it would receive a sufficient number of applications in return for the fees it paid BlueVine for its services."

SBA's 2021 fee change, in BlueVine's words, had the effect of "increasing the fees provided to lenders for originating smaller dollar amount loans." BlueVine's median loan was under $25,000, its lawyers wrote, and they credited that change, along with Celtic's decision to offer only second-draw loans in 2021, for the growth in BlueVine's revenue from Cross River relative to Celtic. In SBA's loan-level data, all 19,999 of Celtic's 2021 loans were second draws.

Congressional scrutiny

On May 27, 2021, House Select Subcommittee Chairman James E. Clyburn wrote to Lifshitz, requesting documents on BlueVine's PPP fraud controls and bank-partner relationships (we do not have a copy of the letter). Those are congressional allegations and document requests, not findings.

The Subcommittee's December 1, 2022 report, "We Are Not the Fraud Police," kept BlueVine as a case study alongside Womply, Blueacorn, Kabbage, Cross River, and Customers Bank (we do not have a copy of the report; its findings on BlueVine, Blueacorn, Womply and Celtic Bank are summarized in the House-report article). The report is a majority-staff investigative document: scrutiny, not adjudication.

Fraud, and the bank that pushed back

By mid-May 2021 Celtic had confirmed 1,723 PPP fraud cases, 1,557 of them on BlueVine-processed loans, according to the House report. One convicted fraudster texted a co-conspirator: "10k guaranteed...they don't check for s---...it's all automated." In the program's first three months, the report found, BlueVine added software and manual reviews in response to requests or pressure from Celtic; BlueVine's own analysis said the new checks would have caught 78% of previously approved fraudulent applications. In April 2021 board materials, Celtic estimated BlueVine's rate of fraudulent loan funds at 8.54 percent in first-draw loans and 0.08 percent in second-draw loans, on then-available data. The report also found that delays at BlueVine caused Celtic to file suspicious-activity reports late.

What customers were offered

BlueVine's coronavirus notice of March 16, 2020 warned customers of "longer than normal wait times" at its support team and named no payment deferral or fee waiver. In October 2020 it announced general availability of its business checking, with zero monthly, ATM, NSF and incoming-wire fees; its CEO said small businesses needed services that "support – not nickel-and-dime – them." By March 2021 it was offering Lyft drivers a PPP application built for them. In November 2021 it started a "Resilience Program" with one $10,000 prize, which went to a boutique fitness studio in May 2022.

New credit and a new bank partner

In September 2020 BlueVine took a $75 million revolving credit facility from funds managed by Atalaya Capital Management, to expand its line of credit. On September 1, 2021, Coastal Community Bank began a banking-as-a-service partnership with BlueVine, according to its parent company's SEC filing. In February 2022 the Atalaya facility added two lenders and a committed amount of $150 million, and BlueVine said it had "restarted its Line of Credit forward flow program." We found no BlueVine layoff announcement among its 2020–2022 newsroom and blog pages, and no BlueVine notice in California's WARN reports for July 2019 through June 2023.

After the pandemic — where they are now

The company remains independent and private and describes itself as a small-business digital banking platform, with deposits through Coastal Community Bank and credit through Celtic Bank (company disclosures); a December 2025 Financial Technology Association Q&A gives customer, loan and deposit totals and identifies Lifshitz as co-founder and CEO.

Sources

Company self-reported (attribute to BlueVine; not independently verified here)

Congressional / oversight

SBA PPP loan-level data and other records

  • Direct-lender row (SBA PPP FOIA data, Bluevine Capital Inc. as lender of record: 6 loans / $29,071 / $12,738.50 estimated fees)
  • No PPPLF, no self-aid record (platform, not lender of record)
  • Partner-bank books (SBA PPP FOIA data: Celtic 167,201/$4.49 billion; Cross River 478,866/$12.89 billion — bank-wide, multi-channel)
  • DoorDash winter-grants release (BlueVine PPP partnership): expanding main street strong winter grants 2021-01-27
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