Kaylan Pepin, CPA, CMA

Kaylan Pepin is the co-founder and CEO of Levr.ai, the business lending software company that gives business loan brokers in Canada and the United States one place to find deals, prepare lender-ready applications and place them with the right lenders. He founded Levr in September 2021 after eight years on the lender side of the table, and he has led it from a first line of code to a venture-backed platform that brokers, marketplaces and banks now build on.

Kaylan learned business lending inside three of Canada's most respected institutions. He started at RBC in Edmonton as a Commercial Banking Associate and was promoted to Manager, Commercial Banking, within eight months. He then managed commercial banking relationships at CIBC in Vancouver before joining BDC, Canada's bank for entrepreneurs, as a Senior Account Manager on the technology industry team. At BDC he financed fast-growing Canadian tech companies and led the bank's participation in the $500,000 round for fintech Peloton Technologies. He saw every stage of a business loan up close: the intake, the credit memo, the approval and the follow-through.

He is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CMA) and earned the designation on the CMA Ambassador full-tuition scholarship, awarded for student leadership. At MacEwan University, where he completed a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting, he founded the MacEwan University Accounting Club, wrote its constitution, launched the school's first annual tax clinic and grew the club to seven executives and more than 400 members in two years. He works fluently in English and French.

Since 2020 Kaylan has also written KaylanPepin.com, a blog and newsletter on venture debt and startup financing with more than 2,000 readers. His pieces explain what venture debt really is, how merchant cash advances finance e-commerce, and how founders should weigh debt, equity and bootstrapping. The same plain-language approach runs through Levr's guides for brokers.

Under his leadership, Levr raised $2 million from investors including Ripple Ventures, Sprout, Weave, MAVAN Capital Partners, WUTIF and AC100, and was selected for the Consulate General of Canada's 2025 Silicon Valley Fintech Program. In 2026 he made the core broker plan free, removing a $200 monthly fee so that anyone who helps businesses get funded can use professional tools. Brokers joined quickly in the months that followed, and brokers and online marketplaces across both countries now use Levr as the white-labeled technology behind their Apply Now buttons.

Kaylan has also taken Levr directly to the banks. Levr signed its first two U.S. banks with direct API connections, so complete, underwriting-ready applications land in their systems without email attachments or re-keyed PDFs. He built partnerships with Secure Broker, the certification standard for alternative finance brokers, and Business Broker HQ, a community of more than 1,800 business transaction advisors.

Kaylan is a regular voice for brokers on LinkedIn, where more than 8,600 people follow his writing on business lending, broker economics and fintech. He speaks plainly about the problems he saw from inside the banks: slow intake, incomplete files and brokers who do the hardest work in lending while giving away half their commission in splits. Every product decision at Levr traces back to those problems.

His thesis is simple: anyone should be able to broker a business loan, and technology should do the heavy lifting for the business owner, the broker and the lender. Kaylan splits his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Vancouver.