Einat Steklov could practice law. Getting a phone line was another matter. After moving from Israel to the United States in 1996, she encountered a small administrative absurdity with large implications: she needed an American credit history to do ordinary American things. Her qualifications had crossed the border. Her financial reputation had apparently remained behind.
She and her husband earned good money, yet establishing credit remained difficult. Years later, she recalled the obstacle plainly: “we could not establish credit.” A person could be educated, employed and careful with money, and still arrive at a lender’s desk as an almost empty folder. The folder had considerably less to say than the person.
That gap between a working life and its financial record eventually became part of the reason for Kashable, the company she co-founded with Rishi Kumar. Today, Steklov is its co-CEO. But the route from an immigrant’s frustration to a workplace lending business ran through legal practice, an MBA and a different kind of financing altogether. It took years to turn the observation into an operating model.
First, the invoices
Steklov earned her law degree at Tel Aviv University and practiced in both Israel and New York. Her subsequent career included co-founding a venture-backed e-commerce company and serving as president of a factoring business. She completed her MBA at Columbia Business School in 2004. Each move placed her closer to the practical problem of how a business gets the money it needs to keep going.
In 2008, she and Kumar co-founded Coral Capital Solutions. The company finances businesses through factoring and asset-based lending. Steklov’s responsibilities span strategy, business development and the structuring of financing. The legal training remained useful: an agreement has to make sense as a business proposition and survive being read closely.
There is a particular kind of frustration in having made a sale and still waiting for the money. Coral’s business addresses that interval. Its customers’ receivables can support financing before their customers settle the invoices. It is an unglamorous corner of commerce, full of deadlines, documents and the difference between money owed and money available.
That earlier company also makes the Kashable partnership easier to understand. Steklov and Kumar had already worked together on lending before building a consumer business. Kumar brought a background in computer science and derivatives trading. Steklov brought law, commercial finance and management. Their collaboration had a working history before it acquired its next company name.
Let the paycheck into the conversation
Kumar had also experienced the difficulty of establishing credit after coming to America, in his case from India. Their shared experience helped shape Kashable, founded in 2013. The question was how to assess people whose employment might tell a lender something useful that a conventional credit file could miss.
Steklov’s explanation begins with the workplace. Instead of trying to find borrowers across the entire consumer market, Kashable works through participating employers. Employees can apply for installment loans, with repayments arranged through payroll. Employment information becomes part of the assessment. A steady job enters the conversation earlier.
The choice also changes how the service reaches people. Human resources teams and benefits consultants become part of the distribution network. A lending product arrives through a relationship that already exists between an employer and its workforce. For a founder, that means building confidence among the people choosing benefits as well as the people using them.
Steklov has described credit monitoring and education as companions to the loan program. People need to understand their financial record and be able to see changes in it. Her interest extends beyond the immediate transaction to the possibility of greater access to mainstream financial services over time. Borrowing is one step in that larger ambition.
A schematic of the model. Access through an employer does not guarantee loan approval.
It is a recognizably lender’s approach to an access problem. Someone still has to evaluate an application, price the risk and collect repayments. The promise depends on the machinery working. A generous intention has to become a functioning credit business before it can be useful to a borrower.
The money has two different jobs
Building that machinery requires capital, and lending companies make the vocabulary unusually easy to muddle. In May 2025, Kashable announced a $250 million credit facility led by Nomura Corporate Funding Americas. That financing expanded its capacity to lend. It was a credit facility, with a different purpose from selling investors an ownership stake in the company.
In April 2026 came a $60 million Series C announcement led by Sustainable Investing at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with Revolution Ventures and EJF Ventures participating. The announced terms deserve their small print: Goldman committed up to $50 million, comprising $25 million initially and another $25 million subject to conditions. Existing investors supplied an additional $10 million.
Employees with access to Kashable through participating employers. Access is different from borrowing.
By then, Kashable said its platform was available to more than four million employees. Steklov also said the business had been profitable for several years. The scale gives her original question a different setting: an observation about exclusion now has to hold up across a large network of employers and a substantial lending operation.
Recognition had arrived earlier. Goldman Sachs honored Steklov at its 2022 Builders and Innovators Summit. American Banker included her among its 2024 Innovators of the Year honorees. Those were distinct milestones, separate from the later investment. An invitation to an entrepreneurship gathering and a commitment of capital are different entries in a company’s history.
Who gets a say in the room?
Steklov’s account of leadership includes a concern with who gets opportunities inside her own organization. She has spoken about wanting women to advance, receive equal pay and have influence in company decisions. Her chosen territory for action is the organization she helps run. That makes the ambition concrete enough to involve actual promotions and actual pay.
Her mentoring advice is similarly practical. She encourages women entering finance to find experienced advocates, participate in professional associations and become visible within their industry. A career develops through relationships as well as assignments. Being capable helps; having someone who recognizes that capability and can support it helps too.
“Building a career is a marathon and not a sprint.”
Einat Steklov
She describes mentoring as an exchange that challenges her own thinking. Younger entrepreneurs bring questions that prompt her to reconsider familiar problems. Her advice combines long-term planning with enough flexibility to recognize an unexpected opening. A career plan needs somewhere to go, while leaving a little room for the world to interfere.
There is an operational side to that patience. Asked how she approaches unfamiliar work, Steklov has described starting with the goal and breaking the route into smaller tasks. In discussing fintech leadership, she emphasizes trust, privacy, regulatory responsibilities and transparency. The responsibilities accumulate. A chief executive has to keep several kinds of judgment in use at once.
Her recent comments on artificial intelligence follow that same concern with judgment. She has welcomed the team’s experiments with AI while emphasizing transparency, oversight and human decision-making in financial services. For a company using data to broaden an assessment of borrowers, the question of who understands a decision matters. More information creates responsibilities as well as opportunities; someone still has to explain what the business is doing with it.
A little room outside the ledger
Her personal interests provide a welcome change of scenery: summer cycling, winter skiing and scuba diving on vacation. She has named The Big Bang Theory as a favorite show and a sunny morning with coffee as a favorite part of the day. The coffee, at least, requires no underwriting.
These ordinary preferences belong in the picture because a company biography tends to make a person look permanently available for a meeting. She has also described time for family and friends, cooking and occasional theater. There is a life around the work, even when the work generates a great many calls.
A longer file, a longer view
Steklov continues to make the case for financial support through employers in interviews, public writing and industry discussions. Her Forbes contributions have addressed credit access and the relationship between unexpected expenses and retirement goals. She is scheduled to speak at the American Fintech Council Policy Summit in Washington in November 2026. The workplace remains central to the argument.
In the April funding announcement, she focused on the gap between the timing of paychecks and the expenses of everyday life. The company’s plans include extending its employer relationships and developing its platform. Those are practical tasks for the next stage: bringing more workplaces into the network and working with the HR, benefits and finance teams responsible for introducing the service.
Her stated ambition is to help people move toward greater financial security, including the possibility of becoming savers. That is a longer horizon than issuing a loan. It also keeps the story attached to the original frustration: a person’s financial possibilities can depend on what an institution is prepared to recognize.
When Steklov arrived, she had a working life that her American credit file could barely describe. Decades later, her business asks employers and lenders to consider more of that life. The blank folder has acquired quite a few pages.