A CFO walks into a startup. Four years later, she runs it.
Revital Gadish is the CEO of Qira, a 25-person fintech at 49 West 45th Street that sits inside the mechanics of American renting. Not the marketing of it, not the discovery of it, not the app you swipe on when you are looking for a two-bedroom. The mechanics. The security deposit. The refund. The escrow. The reconciliation with Yardi. The compliance with whichever state's landlord-tenant statute happens to apply this month. This is unglamorous work with a large surface area, and Gadish spent thirty years training for it.
She was an auditor at Ernst & Young Israel in 1995, back when a lot of what Qira automates was done in filing cabinets. She was a controller at Teleknowledge, then its CFO. She moved to New York and did an audit tour at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She was corporate controller at Taro Pharmaceuticals, VP finance at Fundtech. In 2012 she joined Payoneer, the cross-border payments company, as General Manager of Payoneer Global Services and Chief Accounting Officer and Treasurer. She spent about seven years there.
Then, in 2020, she took a job as CFO and COO of a small rental fintech. In 2021 that company merged with another and picked up a new name: Qira. Somewhere between the merger and now, the finance chief became the chief executive. She is not the founder. She is what the founder needed to become.
The company she runs, in four figures.
Escrow, refunds, deposits, and the deeply unsexy plumbing of your lease.
A security deposit is a small, weird, mostly illiquid financial instrument. It sits in an escrow account, sometimes earning interest, sometimes not, governed by state statutes that vary wildly on timing, disclosure, and permissible deductions. When you move out, a human reads through a punch list and decides whether the crack in the tile was there when you moved in. The refund gets processed, sometimes on paper, and mailed to a forwarding address you may or may not have updated. This is roughly how it worked in 1985 and roughly how most of it still works.
Qira builds the software that replaces the humans and the paper. It offers a cash-based security deposit alternative that lets a renter pay a small monthly fee instead of writing a big check up front. It processes deposits and refunds through full escrow management. It runs installment plans on deposits at 3, 6, and 12 months. It handles rent payments. It has a "Pay Later" option. It integrates with Rent Manager, ResMan, Yardi, and RealPage so property managers can use it without leaving their existing stack.
Gadish's argument, made repeatedly in her writing, is that the market has too many single-purpose vendors doing one piece of this stack and not enough end-to-end operators doing all of it. This is the argument you make when you run the end-to-end operator.
Thirty-one years, six countries of employer, one specialty.
What she has been writing.
Small things that add up.
Not the founder.
Qira's co-founders, Jeremy Esekow and Guy Wollmann, are no longer with the company. Gadish arrived as CFO/COO and rose to CEO.
Payoneer alumna.
Seven years running Global Services and finance at one of Israel's biggest fintech exports.
Two fintech pillars.
Fundtech and Payoneer, back-to-back. That is a specific and deep bench.
Cash-based, not insurance.
Qira's deposit alternative is cash-based - a distinction Gadish highlights against competitors.
25 people.
A small team for a category that spans 50 state statutes and four PM software integrations.
Phoenix bet on her.
Israel's largest institutional investor led the Series A. The check found the operator.
The obvious questions.
Who is Revital Gadish?
She is the CEO of Qira, a New York-based fintech that serves multifamily and single-family rental property managers with security deposit management, rent payments, refunds, and a cash-based deposit alternative.
Is she the founder of Qira?
No. Qira was formed in 2021 from the merger of Rentigo and HelloRented. Gadish joined as CFO/COO in 2020 and later became CEO.
What did she do before Qira?
About seven years at Payoneer as GM of Payoneer Global Services and Chief Accounting Officer & Treasurer. Before that: Fundtech, Taro Pharmaceuticals, PricewaterhouseCoopers NY, Teleknowledge, and Ernst & Young Israel.
What exactly does Qira do?
Security deposit alternatives, full escrow-based deposit management, refund processing, rent payment processing, and pay-later options - integrated with Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager, and ResMan.
How much has Qira raised?
Publicly reported total funding is roughly $9M, including an $8M Series A led by Phoenix Insurance in October 2021.