With $500K In The Bank, Credible Launches A Kayak-Style Marketplace To Simplify Student Loan Refinancing

With outstanding student debt now over $1 trillion in the U.S., it’s clear that college grads are struggling mightily to make payments and refinance their debt. Meanwhile, thanks to decades of plummeting borrowing costs, millions upon millions of consumers have been able to refinance mortgages and begin paying down debt.

In some irrational alternate universe, one might expect that lenders would be lining up to take advantage of soaring student loan debt by offering more favorable terms than competitors. Nope, because that’s “crazy.” Even when students happen to find a decent job out of college, make payments on time and improve their credit scores, they remain locked into absurdly high fixed rates.

The majority of the big players in the private loan market appear more than happy to maintain the status quo, and wave off refinancing as a threat to the bottom line. Enter: Credible, a San Francisco-based startup launching today that aims to help graduates extricate themselves from high fixed rates, and make it easy to switch lenders and save on their loan payments.

Taking home the “Best 2.0 Company” Award at this week’s Launch Festival, Credible co-founder Stephen Dash said that, while racked with debt, the truth is that today many students could save a significant amount of money on their loan payments by switching lenders. Yet, the majority of them don’t because they don’t know how, or because the process of switching is so complicated and time-consuming.

So, Credible has developed a platform that makes it easy for students to find out whether or not they’re eligible for lower interest rates and could benefit from switching lenders. The startup’s loan comparison tools enable students to understand their loan profile relative to their peers and get an indication of what similar borrowers are paying for private loans.

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AdEspresso Raises $500K To Make Facebook Ad Optimization Easy For Small Businesses

AdEspresso, a startup offering Facebook ad tools for small and medium businesses, is announcing that it has raised its first outside funding, a seed round of $500,000.

The company focuses on ad optimization, namely finding the most effective combination of text and images for your ads. It says that customers upload possible images and text for the ads, then AdEspresso will test out different combinations and track the performance based on metrics like clicks, leads, and sales. For example, the company says it could tell an advertiser, “This picture for Female from 18 to 24 is performing 40% worst than your campaign’s average. Stop displaying it now!”

The idea of testing and optimizing different ad “creative” isn’t new, but CEO Massimo Chieruzzi said there aren’t many companies offering a product targeted at SMBs advertising on Facebook. Similarly, he acknowledged that there are plenty of social ad companies out there, but he said most of them aren’t really direct competitors (he mentioned Qwaya as one).

AdEspresso spun out of an Italian ad agency but has moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the 500 Startups incubator. The company says it spent about a year developing the product before launching an open beta six months ago, and it’s on-track to sign up 5,000 advertisers by the end of 2013, with nearly $900,000 in ad spending managed so far.

While there’s still more work to be done on the product, the biggest item on the AdEspresso to-do list is probably making money — Chieruzzi said he’ll be implementing a business model that charges customers between $49 and $299 a month based on ad spending (customers can also use the product for free if they spend less than $2,000 a month). He also said that while AdEspresso is now headquartered in Mountain View, he plans to keep the technical team in Italy.

The funding, meanwhile, came from 500 Startups, Atlantic Capital Partners, and various angel investors including Richard Chen and Armando Biondi.

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