Andrew Reiser’s big idea began in two small rooms

Andrew Reiser remembers moving day. His young company had been working out of two rooms in shared space in lower Manhattan, half the team in each. Then an office in Midtown became available after a music-industry agent defaulted on the lease. Everyone helped with the move. The next morning, the company had a permanent address and a meeting worth celebrating.

For a founder in the business of financing other people’s ambitions, it was a pleasingly tangible achievement. A business plan can be revised indefinitely. An office requires somebody to turn up tomorrow. Reiser later recalled that meeting as the moment he felt sure the company would succeed. Finance has its elaborate measures of confidence; occasionally, the measure is a roomful of colleagues.

That company became Kapitus. By July 2026, it reported connecting $10 billion in financing to more than 65,000 small businesses, either directly or through its financing network. The numbers are company totals, accumulated across two decades. Behind them sits Reiser’s continuing assignment: build an organization capable of supplying capital to owners whose businesses do not fit comfortably into conventional lending.

The accountant who went looking for a gap

Reiser arrived with experience on several sides of a balance sheet. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and began his career as a CPA with Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse. Accounting offers an introduction to the distance between what a business says and what its numbers can support. His subsequent jobs took him closer to making the decisions himself.

He served as executive vice president of Fidelco Capital Group, president of Windsor Group and a managing director at Donald & Co. Securities. He also became chief executive of Arcavista Corporation, a software business. Investment banking, private capital and software leadership are different occupations, but each requires a view of how a company might develop beyond its present circumstances. Reiser brought that accumulated experience to small-business finance.

In January 2006, he founded Strategic Funding Source with ten employees. The early proposition addressed businesses that struggled to obtain conventional financing. Restaurants and small retailers were part of the alternative-finance market, where future credit-card receipts could provide the basis for funding. For an owner, the underlying question was practical: could tomorrow’s trade help pay for something the business needed today?

A lender has to borrow, too

Supplying money requires access to money. It is an obvious point that can disappear behind the more photogenic parts of entrepreneurship. Reiser’s company needed relationships with institutions willing to finance its own operation. The owner seeking working capital and the executive arranging a funding facility occupy different desks in the same chain.

The company obtained its first senior bank line from Capital One in 2012. In 2014, Pine Brook provided a $110 million equity commitment. These were steps in developing the capacity to serve more businesses. Reiser was putting his earlier finance experience to work on the company itself, alongside the work of understanding its customers.

In June 2018, Strategic Funding announced its first asset-backed securitization, issuing $105 million in fixed-rate notes. A pool of small-business loans and revenue-based financing agreements secured the notes. Guggenheim Securities served as structuring adviser and initial purchaser. The transaction brought the company’s financing activity into another institutional format, with a senior class rated investment grade.

The mechanics matter to the personal story. Reiser’s job had grown beyond identifying unmet demand. He had to help create a business that could finance that demand repeatedly. The customer’s application was one end of the operation; the company’s own capital arrangements were the other. Expansion depended on keeping both ends working.

The paperwork gets a different job

The operational problem was less glamorous. Earlier underwriting involved people entering and reviewing bank-statement data manually. When applications accumulated, the work could produce backlogs. When volumes fell, the capacity was still there. Typing also introduced errors. A growing financing company could find itself held back by the process used to understand the businesses asking for money.

Kapitus adopted Ocrolus to extract and analyze bank-statement information. The system combined computer vision with human review, supplying data for the lender’s own models. In 2019, Kapitus introduced an automated funding process for qualified deals. The important qualification is that word, qualified: a faster process still operates within a company’s decisions about which applications it can support.

Reiser’s account of technology keeps returning to lending judgment. Better systems can collect information and increase capacity; the business still has to understand the risk it is taking. That emphasis makes his career in accounting and finance relevant to the software decisions. Speed is attractive to an applicant. The organization delivering it must also know what the information means.

“The tech is really to enable you to get better data and more scalability.”

Andrew Reiser · Beyond Banks interview

In October 2022, Kapitus selected Mambu’s cloud lending platform to support its next stage of development. The announced purpose included managing more customer contracts and introducing financing products more quickly. Reiser pointed to a system that people with limited coding experience could use to create products. The convenience was for the team building the service as well as the owner applying for it.

More kinds of money, under one name

The company had already changed what customers called it. In January 2019, Strategic Funding Source announced the Kapitus identity, bringing funding and servicing divisions under the same name. The announcement linked the change to a broader product portfolio, new technology and a larger executive team. A short name can conceal a considerable amount of organizational tidying.

For Reiser, the expanding business meant providing different routes to financing. Kapitus operated as both a direct provider and a marketplace with outside financing partners. By the 2026 acquisition announcement, its offering included term loans, revenue-based financing, SBA loans, equipment financing and revolving lines of credit. The range gave the company more ways to respond to different business needs.

Equipment became a more substantial part of the operation in October 2024, when Kapitus acquired Ten Oaks Commercial Capital and launched an equipment finance arm. Ten Oaks brought equipment-finance and working-capital experience. Its founder and president, Greg McIntosh, described combining his company’s origination capabilities with Kapitus’s infrastructure and balance sheet. The announcement also set out plans to develop relationships with equipment dealers and manufacturers.

That development gives a concrete shape to Reiser’s broader assignment. Growth capital can mean money for an operating cycle or a particular piece of equipment. Each purpose creates different questions about timing and repayment. Adding products makes the company’s internal work more complicated while offering the possibility of a more useful conversation with the owner.

The people who carry the business

Reiser’s early office memory keeps the team in the picture. His public account of building Kapitus places hiring near the center of the work. Choosing colleagues, creating a place they want to stay and aligning their interests are recurring concerns. The founder whose team helped move offices eventually had to help build an organization in which responsibility could travel much further.

That view was visible early. In 2013, he joined DailyFunder’s CEO Corner, a forum for the alternative-finance industry. The announcement emphasized discussion among people working in the business and the importance of relationships as technology developed. Reiser was participating in a professional conversation about a sector he was also helping to build.

In June 2025, Kapitus was named to Inc.’s Best Workplaces list. The selection process included an employee survey covering management, professional development and company culture, along with a benefits audit. Reiser credited the team’s daily work and relationships with customers and partners. Recognition cannot describe every working day, but this one gave his repeated emphasis on people a public point of reference.

Twenty years in, another opening

July 2026 brought a change in ownership. Kapitus announced that an affiliate of InterVest capital partners had acquired it. The plan was for Kapitus to continue operating independently, with additional growth capital and access to commercial-finance expertise. Reiser remained the chief executive quoted in the announcement, discussing an expanded product set and support for small businesses.

On LinkedIn, he thanked the employees, customers and partners who had helped build the company. He also singled out Pine Brook, its lead investor for twelve years. That acknowledgment connected the new transaction to an earlier stage of the business. An acquisition announcement can make a company’s history look like a destination; Reiser presented it as another stage of work.

The distance from two shared rooms to a financing network is considerable. His stated purpose has stayed recognizable: help owners obtain the capital their businesses need to develop. Twenty years in, the assignment comes with more products, more institutional relationships and a new owner. Somewhere at the far end of those arrangements is still a person trying to get the next thing done.