He hands small business owners the keys to the buildings they have rented for years. The lease quietly becomes a mortgage, and Main Street finally owns its own walls.
Walk into a corner restaurant that has been on the same block for fifteen years. The owner knows your order, the neighbors, the mail carrier. The one thing the owner does not know is whether the building will still be theirs to rent next year. Kevin Song spends his days on that exact gap, and he has built a company, withco, around closing it.
withco buys the building a small business already occupies, becomes its landlord, then signs a five-year lease engineered to do something unusual. A slice of every rent payment is set aside into a fund. At the end of the term, that money comes back to the tenant as a down payment, and they buy the building from withco at a price agreed on day one. The renter walks in a tenant and walks out an owner.
It sounds like financial engineering because it is. But for Song the math is personal before it is clever. His parents are the reason the model exists.
Song's parents landed at JFK with the standard-issue version of the American dream and bought a grocery store in Brooklyn. They ran it for two decades. They were current on every payment. Then a developer bought the building, and the rent moved in a direction the family could not follow. The doubling did the rest. After twenty years, the keys went back in a matter of weeks.
My parents created so much value for their neighborhood but didn't get to keep their business. It felt like an illogical indecency.- Kevin Song
That phrase, "illogical indecency," is the closest thing withco has to a founding document. The store did everything a business is supposed to do. It served a neighborhood, it lasted, it mattered. And success was precisely what priced it out. The better the block did, the more valuable the building became, and the more the family had to lose.
Song did not arrive at this idea as an outsider to capital. He studied applied economics at Cornell's Dyson School, graduating in 2012, then started his career as an investment banking analyst at J.P. Morgan. Over the following years he invested in, managed, and advised more than fifty companies and had a hand in deploying over a billion dollars of equity capital. He knows what a down payment is, what a mortgage does, and who tends to get left out of both.
All of that experience collapses into one line he keeps returning to:
The only thing that separates most renters from becoming owners is actually a down payment.- Kevin Song
It is a deceptively small observation with a large consequence. The wealth that real estate creates flows to whoever holds the deed. A business can pour years of foot traffic and goodwill into a block, and when the building sells or the rent jumps, that value flows out the door to a landlord who never made a sandwich. withco's premise is that the people generating the value should be allowed to capture some of it.
There is a quieter detail in the family story that explains the urgency. When the grocery store went, the home went with it. Many immigrant small business families tie their housing and their livelihood to the same thread, so when one frays both unravel. Song does not describe withco as a real estate fund that happens to do good. He describes it the other way around: a way to keep families from losing two things at once, with the financing built to make that possible rather than incidental.
Song's critique is not that landlords are villains or that banks are broken. It is narrower and harder to argue with. The two instruments most small businesses are offered, a commercial lease or a conventional mortgage, were not designed around how a corner business actually grows. A lease gives you a place to operate and no claim on the upside you create. A mortgage demands a down payment most operators cannot assemble while also making payroll. Between those two options sits a wide gap, and most small businesses spend their entire life inside it, renting indefinitely and building equity for someone else.
withco's structure is an attempt to bridge that gap without asking the operator to choose between running the business and saving for the building. The savings happen automatically, folded into rent the business is already paying, which is the part Song seems proudest of. Nobody has to be a disciplined saver or a sophisticated buyer. The mechanism does the discipline for them, and the purchase price is fixed at the start so a rising market cannot move the goalposts the way it did on his parents.
withco purchases the building the small business already operates in and becomes the landlord.
A five-year lease is signed, with a slice of each rent payment routed into a dedicated fund.
That fund grows quietly in the background until it is large enough to serve as a real down payment.
At term's end the tenant uses it to buy the building at a price locked in on day one. Renter to owner.
When withco came out of stealth in early 2022, it announced more than $30 million across a $4 million seed and a $28 million Series A. The lead investors were the kind venture watchers recognize on sight: Canaan, Founders Fund, Initialized, and NFX. Then the roster gets unusual.
Tennis champion Venus Williams put money in. So did NBA star Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures and Will Smith's Dreamers VC. Restaurateur Danny Meyer backed it through Enlightened Hospitality Investments, former American Express chief Ken Chenault joined, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro added a policy-world stamp to a real estate idea. Athletes, hospitality, finance, and housing policy rarely land on the same line of a single cap table. Here they did, because the pitch crosses all four worlds at once.
withco's tenants are the businesses that make a neighborhood feel like a place: retail shops, restaurants, neighborhood franchises, and medical practices. Any credit-worthy operator that fits the Small Business Administration's definition and clears withco's underwriting can qualify. As of 2025 the company has concentrated its work across the Midwest, the Southeast, and Texas, regions thick with small business owners and steady real estate fundamentals.
The goal is not abstract. Song frames withco as a way to make it exciting to be a small business owner in America again, and to make sure the next family on the corner does not have to learn, in a matter of weeks, that success and ownership were never the same thing.
"The American Dream" is a phrase so overused it has almost stopped meaning anything. Song uses it anyway, but he ties it to something concrete. For his parents the dream was not a feeling, it was a deed, a piece of a neighborhood they could point to and call theirs. Losing it was not a metaphor either. withco's pitch to founders and investors alike is that ownership, the literal kind with a title and an address, is what turns a job into wealth and a tenant into a stakeholder in their own community.
That is also why his cap table makes sense once you look past the celebrity names. Athletes who built fortunes off their own performance, a restaurateur who has watched countless small operators get squeezed, a former housing secretary who spent a career on who gets to own a home. Each of them recognizes a version of the same story. The value a person creates and the value a person keeps are too often two different numbers, and withco exists to pull them closer together.
Song is careful not to oversell it. withco only works for businesses healthy enough to qualify, and it is deliberately patient, measured in five-year cycles rather than quarters. But patience may be the point. The thing that took his family two decades to build was undone in a few weeks, and he has organized an entire company around making the reverse true: a slow, automatic, almost boring path that ends with a small business owner holding the keys to their own front door.
Before withco, Song had a hand in more than a billion dollars of equity capital and over fifty companies. He learned the rules of ownership before deciding to rewrite who gets to play.
The entire business compresses into one sentence he likes to repeat: the only thing between a renter and an owner is a down payment. withco is the door he built into that wall.
Venus Williams, Kevin Durant, Will Smith's fund and restaurateur Danny Meyer all wrote checks into the same lease-to-own idea. A rare line where sport, screen and Main Street agree.
If the corner store on your block matters to you, pass it along.