Most of the day, a small asset management firm in Seattle doesn't buy anything. A single computer just sits there, waiting.

And then, seven times a day, about 200 computers owned by Amazon light up and start replicating that single, sleepy server and begin running software to analyze loans made to individuals, largely to refinance their credit card debt. They're not looking for just any kind of borrower though — they want loans made to borrowers with prime credit, but not the best credit of the bunch, who usually want to refinance their credit card debt.

A package of those kind of loans that will earn an investor 10% a year. And then, once the analysis is done — about 850 milliseconds later — it's all over, and things revert to that single computer in Seattle.

This is the bread-and-butter business of LendingRobot, which manages its clients' money and invests it in loans issued by online lenders. The company started two years ago when two men whose companies had been bought by Microsoft, Emmanuel Marot and Gilad Golan, started buying up loans from Lending Club, the biggest online marketplace lender for consumers.

Soon, the pair realized the kind of loans they wanted to buy were being snapped up before they could get to them. Without automating the process, they couldn't diversify their holdings across many loans.

While Lending Club makes its loans available to investors to buy into over a two-week period, "in reality, the most popular loans are gone in five seconds," Marot said.