Founder · CEO
John Sun
Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer — Spring Labs
A serial fintech entrepreneur who spent years building inside the financial systems he now helps automate. Co-founded Avant, one of fintech's first unicorns, before founding Spring Labs to bring AI-native automation to financial services.
Biography
From building fintech unicorns to building the infrastructure that powers them
John Sun is the Founder and CEO of Spring Labs, where he leads the company's strategic vision and overall operations. A serial entrepreneur with deep roots in fintech, John co-founded Avant in 2012 — one of the fastest-growing consumer lending platforms in history, which became a fintech unicorn valued at over $1 billion and issued more than $5 billion in loans to underserved borrowers across the US and UK.
At Avant, John served as Chief Credit Officer and UK General Manager. In the credit role, he built the decision engines that powered Avant's ability to serve millions of consumers traditionally overlooked by mainstream lenders — using machine learning and alternative data at a time when most lenders still relied on manual review. As UK GM, he led the company's international expansion, navigating a completely different regulatory landscape while preserving the velocity that made Avant distinctive.
Before Avant, John co-founded DebtEye, a debt management platform that went through Y Combinator in Spring 2011 before being acquired by Avant. Earlier in his career, he led the Data and Analytics team at Enova Financial, one of the largest online consumer lenders in the US, where he developed the quantitative intuition that would later define his approach to both Avant and Spring Labs.
The insight behind Spring Labs came from years spent inside financial infrastructure — watching firsthand how fragmented, insecure, and inefficient data exchange had become across the industry. Every institution was solving the same problems independently, at great cost and with significant compliance risk. John founded Spring Labs to change that: to build the AI-native layer that enables financial institutions to automate what should have been automated years ago.
John holds a BS in Finance from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and studied Economics at the University of Chicago. He has been recognized by Inc.'s 30 Under 30 and Crain's Chicago Business 40 Under 40.