The former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration is joining the Boston fintech firm Numerated.

The company announced yesterday that Karen Mills has joined the company as an investor and advisor. Having been an investor and business owner of companies ranging from manufacturing, food production and service-enabled technology, Mills is a leading authority on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation.

She was the administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013, where she managed a loan guarantee portfolio of more than $100 billion and led the agency’s economic recovery efforts in the wake of the Great Recession.

“Technology has the power to help business owners better understand their business cycle and transform how they access the capital they need, when they need it,” Mills said in a statement. “The innovation Numerated brings to its partnership with banks positions lenders to meet these needs and help businesses maximize their opportunities in this fast-moving economy.”

Numerated’s real-time lending and growth platform helps banks and credit unions digitally transform their business lending operations. Local bankers and branches are armed with actionable business intelligence to have proactive conversations with businesses, and businesses can secure loans or lines of credit from their local bank in as few as three minutes.

“Karen shares in our belief that technology can create greater opportunity and more effective partnerships between small businesses and the financial institutions who serve them,” Dan O’Malley, founder and CEO of Numerated, said in a statement. “We’re grateful to tap into her decades of experience in understanding the intertwined roles banks and businesses play in growing local economies across America,”

Mills is a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School and the author of the forthcoming book “Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream: How Technology is Transforming Lending and Shaping a New Era of Small Business Opportunity.”

Mills discusses Numerated in her book including the story of the technology’s initial development within and for $11 billion asset Eastern Bank and as an example of how data, automation and artificial intelligence are being used to evaluate the credit worthiness of businesses.