Meet the team

Brandon is a finance operator who spent the last five years inside corporate turnarounds — Skillz, CoinCloud, CGM, BMG, and Acadea. He watched the same lesson play out again and again, and it shapes how BuildUp lends: capital deployed correctly can save a company, and capital deployed recklessly can bury one.

That work gave him a deep feel for the essence of a business and the practical fluency to talk to banks and owners alike. Brought on as lead underwriter at Key Business Strategies, he saw a gap no one was serving well: private credit that actually works for small businesses — the lifeblood of America. He founded BuildUp Capital to solve it — underwrite the asset and the operator, move fast, and say yes when both are right.

Brandon holds an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business and a BBA in Real Estate from the University of San Diego, and is based in Salt Lake City.

Donna brings two decades in hard money and secured asset lending to BuildUp, where she leads underwriting and portfolio discipline as Chief Investment Officer. A former federal trustee with a background in business brokerage, she is one of the country’s foremost authorities on real-estate-secured lending — the judgment that keeps a portfolio out of trouble, and that knows how to unwind it when trouble finds others.

She served as lead plaintiff in the USA Capital matter — the roughly $1B hard-money fund that collapsed in 2008 — where her advocacy helped investors recover tens of millions of dollars. A pioneering woman in American business, she was among the country’s first female executives and first female tech entrepreneurs, at MTC. More of her story to come.

Ryan leads technology and engineering at BuildUp Capital, building the systems behind our underwriting, intake, and borrower experience so capital moves at the speed our clients need. More of his background to come.