A machine can be valuable, necessary and already bolted to a factory floor. The company using it can have customers, revenue and a plausible plan. Yet the loan request may still arrive with the financial equivalent of a coffee stain: a recent restructuring, a leverage issue, a sector slump or a balance sheet that makes a conventional lender pause. Kiran Kapur built 36th Street Capital for that pause.
His business occupies a part of finance where the collateral is tangible but the answer is rarely mechanical. The firm lends against equipment and structures leases for middle-market companies, including borrowers outside investment grade. Its work can fund a purchase, release cash from machinery a company already owns or help another lender move an approved transaction off its books. The common feature is not distress. It is a situation that needs someone to look beyond a standard box.
Kapur did not arrive at that idea through startup mythology. He arrived through operating experience. Before becoming a founder, he had spent decades moving through Union Camp, Ingersoll-Rand, GE Capital and CIT Group. At CIT, his jobs included leading financing businesses tied to Avaya and Agilent, running Technology Rental & Services Corp., serving in business development for vendor finance and managing the 4CITe venture capital fund. His remit crossed the entire lending machine: finding business, judging it, documenting it, operating it and managing what could go wrong.
A founder assembled slowly
The route began outside a business school. Kapur studied political science at Dickinson College, then earned an M.B.A. from Temple University. There is a small archival detail that makes the résumé feel less laminated: in a 1983 Dickinson team photograph, he is listed among the men’s soccer players, standing in the second row. Years later, he spent nearly a decade as president and board member of the West Morris Soccer Club in New Jersey.
By 2012, that corporate apprenticeship had led him to GSG Financial as president. The company was expanding beyond its roots in graphic-arts equipment. Kapur framed the job in practical terms: formalize what already worked, separate the vendor and end-user sales teams, hire specialists and build operations that could serve each market efficiently. It was the kind of assignment that tests whether an executive can translate strategy into plumbing.
Then came the larger turn. Kapur and Mark Horan co-founded 36th Street Capital in 2014, and the company began operating the following year. It was Kapur’s first move as an entrepreneur. A recruiting-industry account of the launch describes an experienced team, a detailed plan and funding and equity support from Tennenbaum Capital Partners. The bet was not that the pair had discovered equipment finance. It was that they knew a segment of it well enough to build a focused independent firm.
“There are still good deals to be done, but navigating the uncertainty requires more rigor.”Kiran Kapur, 2025 equipment finance roundtable
The work inside a “maybe”
Specialty lending can sound like a euphemism for saying yes after somebody else said no. Kapur’s public comments point to a more demanding model. A complex credit still has to survive due diligence and stress tests. The lender has to understand the equipment’s use, value and resale possibilities, then set those facts beside the borrower’s cash flow, capital structure and operating plan. Structure is not decoration added after approval. It is part of the underwriting.
That makes the human element hard to remove. In a discussion about the consumerization of commercial lending, Kapur acknowledged how technology had streamlined smaller transactions, from auto-populated documents to quicker pricing. Large-ticket deals were different. They are complex, he said, and involve “real people and intellectual effort.” It is an unfashionable sentence in an industry fond of frictionless interfaces. It is also a clear description of the product: not merely money, but accountable judgment.
The firm’s stated range is broad. It works across technology, manufacturing, packaging, titled vehicles, material handling and other asset categories. Its borrower profiles run from near-investment-grade through B and C credits. Its 2026 funding profile lists transactions from $2 million to $50 million, while the 2025 Monitor 100 reported $240 million in new business volume and $424 million in total assets. Variety makes portfolio discipline important. A lender willing to examine unusual stories cannot allow one industry, asset or borrower to become the whole story.
More room to fund: the 2023 facility increase
Capital availability is another part of the craft. In April 2023, 36th Street extended and increased its senior secured revolving credit facility from $170 million to $280 million. Six lenders participated, with Capital One as agent. Kapur’s comment was characteristically directed at utility: the added capacity strengthened the company’s role as a reliable funding source. A facility is impressive only if it helps the firm deliver when a client is ready to close.
When more money requires more restraint
By early 2025, Kapur saw a highly liquid funding market. Fresh capital was arriving faster than originators could produce demand, compressing spreads and encouraging some lenders to accept larger single-borrower exposures. His answer for 36th Street was continuity: keep building a diversified portfolio and avoid a material change in underwriting standards.
At the same time, the borrowers were becoming more complicated. Higher benchmark rates had increased debt-service costs. Some sectors were in downturns. Tariffs, inflation, trade disputes and recession talk introduced new variables into projections. Kapur did not argue that uncertainty should stop lending. He argued that it should increase the rigor behind it. The distinction is small in language and large in practice.
It also explains why he talks about funding relationships as more than price shopping. His advice to brokers and independent finance companies is to work with lenders able to keep their commitments and align with the originator’s business objectives. An ongoing relationship, he has said, should be a win for both sides. Repeat business lowers the cost of misunderstanding. Each completed deal adds context for the next one.
An operator’s route to ownership
The people around the credit
Kapur’s record shows repeated attention to the team surrounding a decision. Former colleagues on LinkedIn describe a pragmatic manager with strategic instincts, a clear path for his teams and an open door. His own hiring comments tend to pair expertise with trust, integrity or alignment with company values. When 36th Street appointed Eric McGriff as chief risk officer in 2023, Kapur emphasized both risk judgment and trustworthiness. When Greg Stitt joined capital markets in 2025, he pointed to service and certainty of execution.
A year later, Stitt was promoted to lead capital markets. The role covers indirect originations, syndications, investor partnerships and team building. Kapur said the promotion reflected Stitt’s ability to work across both buy-side and sell-side transactions in increasingly complex markets. For a firm whose product depends on matching borrowers, equipment, banks and institutional capital, those connections are not background relationships. They are part of the production system.
Kapur has also worried publicly about the next generation of equipment-finance talent. Where, he asked, are the emerging professionals, and is the industry attractive enough compared with their other choices? His proposed answers were flexible work and opportunities to learn from experienced colleagues. That concern fits the business he has built. If large transactions still require intellectual effort, the industry needs a way to pass down the judgment that software cannot supply.
“Together, we’ve built something enduring.”Kiran Kapur on 36th Street Capital’s tenth anniversary
A decade, then the next deal
When 36th Street reached ten years in October 2025, Kapur thanked investors, lenders, partners and team members. The order matters less than the breadth. An independent lender survives through a network of promises: capital providers make funds available; originators bring suitable transactions; employees evaluate them; clients trust the close; and every party expects the documents to mean what they say.
The company’s decade can be read as a founder story, but it is not a story of reckless reinvention. Kapur carried an old industry into a more focused form. His advantage was familiarity with the machinery and a conviction about where it failed to serve good, complicated opportunities. He chose a narrow product category, then allowed room for variation inside it.
That is the useful idea to take from his career. Expertise becomes entrepreneurial when it identifies a repeatable mismatch and builds an institution to resolve it. For Kapur, the mismatch sits between an asset that matters and a credit file that needs explanation. 36th Street’s job is to supply the explanation, test it hard and, when the facts hold, supply the capital too.