Rishi Kumar and the overlooked power of a paycheck

A paycheck is an oddly underappreciated document. It records work performed, money earned, and a relationship that repeats itself every few weeks. To Rishi Kumar, it also contains a lending question: how much does a reliable income tell you about someone’s ability to repay? His company, Kashable, has built a business around taking that question seriously.

Kumar knows something about arriving with credentials that a financial system cannot quite read. He came to the United States from India to study at MIT. The account of his journey includes just $200 on arrival. Years later, his work would connect the technical world of computer science, the trading desks of Wall Street, and the very ordinary problem of getting through an expensive month.

His route has a pleasing complication. Someone trained to work with sophisticated financial instruments eventually turned his attention to the pay stub. A document without much glamour turned out to have considerable commercial possibilities. In Kumar’s story, the interesting engineering begins with noticing what is already there.

The student the system could barely see

At MIT, Kumar encountered the difficulty of establishing a financial identity in a new country. A family’s circumstances abroad did not automatically become an American credit history. The university’s support for international students helped him get his banking established. The experience gave him a practical view of the gap between having potential and having a record that institutions recognize.

His academic preparation covered both sides of his later career. He earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and management science, with a finance focus, followed by a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. The combination matters: a lending business requires software, but it also requires decisions about which risks to accept and how to finance them.

Wall Street came next. Kumar traded fixed-income derivatives, including interest-rate and credit derivatives. He also worked in New York real estate, handling responsibilities that included acquisitions, financing, and transaction management. Across those roles, his work kept returning to the same materials: information, obligations, and the price of uncertainty.

Those experiences supplied a useful vocabulary for entrepreneurship. The later founder could think about the interface a customer sees and the financing arrangements behind it. Kashable would eventually require both. A pleasant application screen, after all, cannot fund a loan by itself.

Starting while others were leaving

Coral Capital Solutions began in 2008, during the credit crisis. Kumar founded the commercial finance business as conventional finance was contracting. It specialized in factoring and asset-based lending, supplying working capital to businesses. He saw an opening in short-duration assets, strong obligors, and the yields available when other participants were retreating.

That decision is an early clue to his approach. The crisis was frightening in aggregate, but Kumar examined a particular part of the market. He was interested in how the underlying assets behaved. His account of entering commercial finance is grounded in the mechanics of a trade, with the entrepreneurial opportunity following from them.

Coral went on to provide more than $1 billion in financing to small businesses. That is a historical description of the commercial business, separate from the consumer lending company he would build afterward. The connection between them is the habit of looking for a financing need that existing arrangements leave awkwardly served.

He also entered as an owner. His first working day in commercial finance was at the company he had founded. Consumer lending would follow the same pattern. Learning the field and accepting responsibility for the enterprise happened together. That is a rather demanding way to arrange one’s induction.

Two newcomers, one familiar problem

Kashable brought Kumar together with Einat Steklov, who had experienced her own difficulty establishing credit after moving from Israel to the United States. They met through a program connecting aspiring entrepreneurs. Their histories gave them a shared interest in people whose financial circumstances were more substantial than their credit files suggested.

The company was founded in 2013. Its central arrangement puts lending inside the workplace benefits system. Participating employers make the service available to eligible employees; borrowers repay through payroll deductions. Employment information and the repayment mechanism become part of the lending model.

There is an organizational insight here as well as a financial one. An employer already has a continuing relationship with a worker. Payroll already moves money on a schedule. Building around those relationships changes how a lender reaches customers and collects repayments. The company’s proposition depends on making those existing connections useful.

“You need to know something about the world in order to know what to fix.”

Rishi Kumar

Kumar’s observation about knowing what to fix gives his engineering background a human scale. Technical skill supplies tools. Experience helps identify the task. His and Steklov’s memories of being financial newcomers explain why a credit file’s blind spots became a business problem they wanted to work on.

The work behind the loan

Kumar’s responsibilities at Kashable include technology, product development, credit, and operations. Those functions describe much of the machinery behind a borrower’s experience. The product must fit the employer’s systems, the credit decision must work, and the repayments must arrive where they belong. Software and financial discipline meet in the same workflow.

By 2016, Employee Benefit News had named him among its Top 50 Benefit Technology Innovators for his work on Kashable’s platform. The recognition was specifically about benefits technology, a useful reminder of the company’s chosen route to customers. Reaching a workplace requires understanding the systems through which benefits are offered.

The lending rationale is straightforward. Kashable says payroll-aligned repayment lowers credit risk, allowing it to offer lower-cost financing. That is the economic argument Kumar and Steklov have taken to employers and investors. It gives the company a reason to discuss repayment design alongside access to credit.

The ambition also extends beyond an individual loan. Kashable offers credit monitoring, financial coaching, and budgeting support. The broader proposition is to help employees handle immediate cash needs while maintaining their longer-term finances. Retirement savings feature repeatedly in that ambition: borrowing from a retirement account can solve today’s shortage by drawing on tomorrow’s resources.

A bigger business, with the arithmetic attached

In January 2024, Kumar announced a $25.6 million Series B, co-led by Revolution and Moneta VC. His stated priorities included distribution, the technology team, underwriting, and additional financial products. The list was concrete. Growth meant improving several parts of the business together.

In May 2025, Kashable announced a $250 million credit facility led by Nomura Corporate Funding Americas. It also described a separate lending relationship with MidCap Financial. By then, the company reported nearly $1.5 billion in originated loans and availability to more than four million employees. Availability measures access through employers; it does not mean four million people borrowed.

April 2026 brought an announced $60 million Series C led by Sustainable Investing at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. The terms deserve their own sentence: Goldman committed up to $50 million, including $25 million initially and a further $25 million subject to conditions. Revolution Ventures and EJF Ventures accounted for another $10 million.

These financing events serve different purposes. A credit facility provides lending capacity; an equity round supports ownership capital and business development. Adding the figures together without explanation would conceal part of the story. For a founder whose work revolves around financing structures, the structure is part of the achievement.

The success that fits its owner

Kumar’s public conversations return to relationships and the meaning of achievement. In his 2024 appearance on Inside the C-Suite, he discussed partnership, leadership, investor fit, and defining success on his own terms. The discussion ranged beyond technical expertise into the people and judgments needed to sustain a company.

He has also credited family, friends, colleagues, and investors with supporting his career. His account of immigration includes arriving with an education but few financial resources or professional relationships. That makes the later emphasis on connections more specific than the usual networking advice. Relationships were part of how his own career became possible.

From July 2021 to September 2024, he served as a board member and trustee of Silicon Couloir, the Jackson Hole nonprofit supporting entrepreneurs. It is another connection to the practical work of helping businesses form and grow. His career includes building companies and participating in an organization that helps others do the same.

In October 2026, Kashable released a white paper examining the tension between employees’ future financial plans and their ability to manage present expenses. The subject fits the question running through Kumar’s work: how should financial institutions account for people whose working lives contain more information than a conventional record captures?

His answer has taken the form of companies, financing arrangements, software, and a partnership with Steklov. It remains attached to something familiar. Every pay cycle produces another record of work and income. Kumar has spent years building a business around what that record might make possible.