Upstart Holdings, Inc. UPST Chief Executive

What Paul Gu says in public, and what their own SEC filings show they own.

Paul Gu

CEO, Co-Founder · Upstart Holdings, Inc.

CEO since May 1, 2026; Thiel Fellow and primary architect of Upstart AI.

@paulxgu Leadership & board →
What they own

Ownership

Skin in the game
44/ 70
Level 3Stakeholder

Gu owns about 1% of Upstart Holdings, Inc., worth $28.2M at the last close.

SEC filings
108
Stake 1.2M reported shares ≈ 1.1% of shares outstanding — no 13G on file, so an estimate 20/35
Founder Not assessed — whether they founded the company has not been researched Not assessed
Tenure No start date on record, so tenure scores nothing 0/10
Track record Not assessed — their prior companies have not been researched Not assessed
Direction Net buyer — 150,000 shares bought on the open market in the last year, no sales 15/15
Discipline 1 late Form 4 in 108 filings 9/10

Nobody has researched this person's career yet, so founder and track record are left out of the score and of the total above.

Score = stake band (35) + founder (15) + tenure (10) + track record (15) + 12-month direction (−10…15) + filing discipline (10). An axis we have not researched is left out of the score and of the total it is shown over. Every input links to a filing or to our own research; the bands are ours.

Reported · Forms 3, 4, 5 1.2M Every lot on the person's own filings, as of May 13, 2026
Last open-market trade Buy · $1.4M May 13, 2026 · 50,000 shares at $27.50 · no 10b5-1 plan
Paper trail 1 late filing Form 4 covering a 2025-01-07 option or RSU conversion in Upstart Holdings, Inc. was filed 2025-01-10, 3 business days later; Section 16 allows two.
Reported Upstart Holdings, Inc. shares Forms 3, 4 and 5 · as of 2026-05-13
0500K1M2M 202120222023202420252026 May 2026: net +25,320 shares across 1 movement (largest: buy +50,000)Nov 2025: net +80,000 shares across 2 movements (largest: buy +80,000) 1.2M

Dots mark the months the activity below moved the line. Hover one for that month's net move, how many movements it folds and the largest.

How the stake is held
SecurityHeld viaShares
Common StockDirect1,102,616
Common Stockby LLC80,000
Common Stockby trust44,930
Reported as of 2026-05-131,227,546
Held directly
90%
Vehicles
2 trusts or entities
Last filing
May 14, 2026
Activity · last 12 months 3 events folded from 3 filing lines · Every filing on EDGAR ↗
DateTypeWhat happenedSharesPriceValueNote
May 13, 2026 Buy Open-market purchase +50,000 $27.50 $1.4M Through by trust · no 10b5-1 plan
Nov 11, 2025 Buy Open-market purchase +20,000 $39.22 $784K Through by trust · no 10b5-1 plan
Nov 11, 2025 Buy Open-market purchase +80,000 $39.23 $3.1M Through by LLC · no 10b5-1 plan
Every issuer Paul Gu files as an insider of
CompanyRoleReportedBeneficial% of class
UPST Upstart Holdings, Inc. This page Chief Executive Officer 1,227,546
2026-05-13		 — —

Reported is every lot on the person's own Forms 3, 4 and 5 — direct and through trusts. Beneficial is the figure stated on the latest Schedule 13D/G cover page, which can exclude shares the person disclaims and include options exercisable within 60 days, so the two are never added together.

Paper trail

108 filings under CIK 0001832812 · captured 2026-09-05 · All filings on EDGAR ↗

On the record with shareholders

Earnings calls

  1. Q2 2026 Aug 4, 2026 Paul Gu used the call to argue that the four things he promised on the May call are the four things Upstart delivered, and that the combination is the point rather than any one line. Core personal loan originations grew 27% sequentially — more than three and a half times the growth of the prior three quarters combined — while unsecured contribution margin rose six points, which he offered as evidence that growth, credit and margin no longer trade against each other at Upstart. He framed the all-time-high contribution profit against the previous peak in Q4 2021, when UMI was below one and the funds rate was near zero, as proof that model improvement rather than the macro is now doing the work. He put concrete numbers on the runway (2.74x a traditional model's accuracy, with 87.38% of the inaccuracy gap left), announced conditional OCC approval for a bank aimed at early 2027, said the auto refinance business is being sunset, and closed on the valuation gap: if the market will not bet on Upstart's future, Upstart will earn the profits to bet on its own. Read the call · 9 quotes →
In their own words

Podcasts, interviews & articles

6 recorded appearances

2026

2025

Talk Upstart AI Day · May 14, 2025 · 51 min

AI Day: Paul Gu, Co-founder and CTO: Our AI Advantage

His most detailed public technical talk: why traditional credit scoring is limited, the Loan Month Model predicting default and prepayment for every month of a loan, the proprietary loss functions and embeddings, treating time as a feature to handle macro shifts, and the separation-accuracy advantage over textbook models.

Watch or read →

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