lease-to-own
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R. Charles Loudermilk, Sr. and the ten-cent idea that kept coming back
Charlie Loudermilk started Aaron Rents with borrowed money and folding chairs. The business carried him far; his friendships, philanthropy, and affection for Atlanta kept bringing him home.
The $500 Furniture Bet That Turned "No Credit" Into a Two-Billion-Dollar Business
For 70 years Aaron's has made the same wager: that millions of Americans want a couch, a fridge or a big-screen TV today, and will pay weekly to own it - no credit score required.
The Ohio Firm That Bought a 1,200-Store Retailer to Feed Its Algorithms
Most investment firms buy a stake and hope. IQVentures buys the whole company, plugs in its own payment rails and risk models, and runs it - a bet that grew into a $504 million take-private of a national retailer.
The Chilean Freight Company That Hands Its Drivers the Keys to the Truck
RockTruck moved 1.7 million last-mile deliveries with a fleet it mostly does not own - then sold 70% of the company to a gas giant. Here is how the collaborative model actually works.
Kafene
Kafene is a New York-based fintech that gives retailers a point-of-sale lease-to-own option for shoppers who get turned away by traditional credit. Using a machine-learning model that weighs more than 20,000 data points, Kafene approves customers in seconds for purchases up to about $5,000 - furniture, appliances, electronics, tires - then lets them lease the item and either pay it off to own it or return it without penalty. It positions itself as a transparent, debt-free alternative to buy-now-pay-later for the roughly 100 million Americans with limited or no prime credit.
Kevin Song
Kevin Song is the founder and CEO of withco, a New York-based company helping small business owners buy the buildings they rent through a lease-to-own model. The son of Korean immigrants whose Brooklyn grocery store was lost when a landlord doubled the rent, Song turned that family loss into a venture-backed mission: turn tenants into owners. A Cornell economics graduate and former J.P. Morgan analyst named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for social entrepreneurship, he raised more than $30 million from Founders Fund, Canaan, NFX and Initialized, plus backers including Venus Williams, Kevin Durant, Will Smith's Dreamers VC and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
Neal Desai
Neal Desai is the CEO and co-founder of Kafene, a New York fintech that lets people without prime credit lease-to-own furniture, appliances, electronics and tires at the point of sale. A molecular biology major from Princeton who spent more than a decade trading equity derivatives on Wall Street, he later became CFO of powersports lender Octane before spending six months methodically studying 45-plus specialty finance niches and choosing lease-to-own. Kafene approves applicants in seconds for an average of roughly $2,700, assigns up to ten risk grades, reports to all three credit bureaus, and has raised well over $100 million from investors including Third Prime, Valar Ventures and Global Founders Capital.
withco
withco is a New York-based property ownership platform on a mission to help small business owners buy the buildings they already work in. Using a lease-to-own model, withco buys commercial real estate alongside high-quality small business owners and transitions them to full ownership over the course of a standard lease term - turning rent payments into a path toward equity and protecting local businesses from displacement.