American Lending Center Celebrates 15 Years Of Growth

IRVINE – American Lending Center, a private non-bank lending institution nationally recognized for both small business lending and operation of the EB-5 immigration and investment program, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this week.

John Shen co-founded American Lending Center (ALC) in 2009 in Long Beach.

“We started with three employees in a small office in Long Beach,” Shen recalled at a celebration Friday, May 31. “Today we have 60 employees on the payroll. When we started and got our first investor for $500,000, we were excited. Then we got a second (investor), and it was $1 million. One million! Today, we have $1.124 billion in assets under management.”

ALC began growing almost immediately, and moved its headquarters to the Airport Tower in Irvine in 2021. It has opened three overseas offices and a satellite office in the state of Washington. The Financial Times has listed ALC on its Fastest Growing Companies for the last three years, and ALC has been on the Inc 5000 for the last four years in a row.

“And we aren’t done yet!” Shen said.

ALC has successfully funded 95 projects across the United States through its EB-5 regional centers – more than any other EB-5 firm. These projects have directly generated 30,000 new jobs, thus improving the regions with both needed facilities and economic growth. These projects and the Paycheck Protection Program that ALC administered during the pandemic retained more than 120,000 jobs.

Shen told his employees that they should feel good about this social support of the communities served and the country at large. Add the number of EB-5 investors helped in their quest to move to the United States and pursue the American Dream, and ALC can fairly say it is making a difference in people’s lives. ALC currently serves more than 1,000 investor clients.

In addition to the EB-5 program, ALC specializes in small business loans, particularly government-guarantee programs including SSBCI, SBA 504 and SBA 7a programs. For more information, go to American Lending Center or for EB-5 related information this website.

About American Lending Center: A Financial Times (FT) Americas’ Fastest Growing Company

American Lending Center (ALC) is a private nonbank lending institution and nationally recognized leader in small business lending. By early 2024, ALC had offered strategically structured senior loan products to 95 qualified projects in 31 states, contributing to a combined construction and business expansion budget of over 1.2 billion dollars. ALC’s lending practice has successfully created more than 30,000 new jobs nationwide since 2009. As one of only a handful of nonbank institutions designated to provide immediate financial relief to struggling small businesses during COVID, ALC provided PPP loans to nearly 30,000 small businesses across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Follow American Lending Center on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.