Vittana, the Seattle non-profit that facilitates micro-loans to students in developing countries, is closing down. The organization sent an email to its supporters Friday morning notifying them of the news.

“Vittana has never been a conventional charity,” wrote CEO Robin Wolaner. “One of our founding beliefs was that once we reached scale, we could do our work sustainably, without shifting costs and risk onto the students. We have had wonderful donors support this effort but after five years and a few different approaches, we haven’t found a robust business model to wean ourselves off that support. We want to be true to our original promises that we would not be philanthropically funded forever.”

Vittana was founded in 2007 by Kushal Chakrabarti, a former Amazon.com employee who stepped down as CEO in March 2013. The non-profit helped hundreds of students in 17 countries get loans for education and received large donations from people like venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Zillow co-founder Rich Barton, and several other high-profile tech executives.

Wolaner, founder of Parenting Magazine and former vice president at CNET, took the CEO reigns in June 2013 after Rebecca Lovell had served as interim CEO.

“We still believe that millions of poor students around the world need access to finance to go to school, and we are working to determine how pieces of our programmatic work can continue as part of another existing organization,” Wolaner wrote. “In any event, the 27 microfinance partners now lending on the Kiva platform will continue to offer our loans to an ever-increasing number of students.”

The full memo from Wolaner is below: