On a warm morning early last year, a start-up founder named Matt Burton addressed a group of 175 investors and executives at the sleek glass IAC building in Chelsea.
Mr. Burton described how his company, Orchard Platform, already a provider of loan data to financial institutions, would soon unveil its own trading platform for loans.
It had all the earmarks of a successful plan. Mr. Burton and the other Orchard founders had worked at an online ad exchange called Admeld, sold to Google for $400 million. Venture capital firms and Wall Street heavyweights including John Mack and Vikram Pandit had invested in Orchard. And Lending Club, the leading start-up offering online loans, had not yet been engulfed in scandal.
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