When Corbin Penland began working as a credit analyst intern at Live Oak Bank in 2017, he never expected he would eventually co-found a company to help banks optimize syndicated lending. 

Founded in 2024, Synply, a spinoff of Live Oak Bank, announced in the spring of that year that it had raised $4.8 million in seed funding. Penland, Synply's CEO, said the company has since raised more than $5.5 million, acquired another company's technology and clients and expanded its Wilmington-based team to 11 employees. 

Synply emerged as a solution to a problem that Penland and other members of Live Oak Bank's loan syndication team faced every day. With co-founder Radek Filarski, who previously worked as a developer at Live Oak Bank and is now Synply’s chief technology officer, Penland launched the software that would become Synply's core product in 2023.

“The best people to innovate are the ones closest to the problems and doing the job all day, every day,” said Penland.

Since the technology to support loan syndication as Penland and his team envisioned didn’t exist yet, they decided to build it themselves. Penland jokes that, as the lead of the loan syndication team, he was the software’s first client.

Loan syndication is a way for community banks to share exposure with other lenders when issuing a loan that’s larger than what a bank would typically make, Penland said.

“The idea that you bring in other lenders to help share exposure gives the borrower more runway,” Penland added, “and what’s really nice about that is it allows growing borrowers to work with bankers in their community and understand their business and that market a little more.”

The challenge is that as borrowers grow, they typically move to a larger bank. 

“So, (loan syndication) is a really great way that banks can grow with their customers, but also comfortably manage the exposure that they’re taking to any single project,” said Penland. 

Penland credits the executive leadership at Live Oak, specifically CEO Chip Mahan, President BJ Losch and co-founder Neil Underwood, for cultivating an innovative culture. The demonstrable success of Penland and Filarski’s product within the Live Oak Bank loan syndication team is part of what prompted the bank to co-lead the startup's seed round through Live Oak Ventures, the investment arm of Live Oak Bancshares. 

Synply recently relocated from office space on Live Oak Bank’s campus, which Penland jokes is like “moving out of mom and dad’s house,” and is now leasing space at the Skyline Center downtown.  

Since launching, Synply has built out its core loan syndication platform and begun developing and rolling out a market intelligence product that also embeds artificial intelligence. The tool allows banks to view historical closed transactions and, over time, to structure loans more accurately. 

At the end of 2025, Synply acquired the technology and client base of DealData, a loan benchmarking platform previously owned by FinMain Inc., a New York-based fintech service platform. Synply plans to integrate DealData's proprietary data into its market intelligence product, which, Penland said, represents the largest loan benchmarking dataset focused on syndicated and participated loans for midsize banks.

Synply has also introduced an AI assistant called Allo, trained on a client's deal history and document formats. However, Penland said, the company is deploying AI tools cautiously, given banking’s low tolerance for error.  

“Just because something can happen on the technology side doesn’t mean it should,” Penland said. “And what consumers might need is different than what banks might need, because we know it’s an industry that is built on calculated risk.”

In addition to the market intelligence product, Synply is also developing a workflow automation tool for banks to configure their own internal processes, triggered by events such as loan payments or financial statement due dates, to track responsibility among different parties in a syndication. 

“We think very long term… we’re trying to be very disciplined about what (AI) should do right now,” Penland said, “because we want to build a very sustainable business that can continue to grow and meet the changing demands in commercial banks, but also help them navigate the changing landscape of technology.”