Yahav Yulzari and the second life of number 22

The shirt had been waiting for years. It belonged to a previous version of Yahav Yulzari: goalkeeper, number 22, playing for Maccabi Haifa. Jack Yulzari had kept it after Yahav gave it to him during his football days. On June 22, 2022, he posted about taking it out again. Pagaya, the company Yahav had co-founded, was on its way to Nasdaq. The date offered a pleasing coincidence: 22, appearing all over again.

There are less charming ways to announce a financial milestone. Most involve a photograph of executives pointing at something. An old football shirt does more work. It suggests a life before the title, before the investor presentation, before anyone had to explain what an artificial intelligence credit network did. Yulzari had already belonged to a team whose results were public. The next team would acquire a stock ticker.

A goalkeeper takes another field

Professional football is a substantial first career to put behind a business biography. Yulzari played in the Israeli league and belonged to the national under-21 team. Reporting on Pagaya’s proposed public transaction also identified him as a former Bnei Yehuda goalkeeper. Long before consumer credit became his occupation, the relevant vocabulary included a penalty area and a clean sheet. Finance would eventually supply another sort of sheet, with considerably more footnotes.

His next business chapter involved property. Yulzari worked on residential and commercial development in Tel Aviv and London. That placed him in a world where a promising plan needs capital, agreements and people willing to commit. Buildings are stubbornly physical objects. A drawing can describe one beautifully without putting a single window in place. Property gives the difference between a proposal and an operating business a fairly visible address.

His LinkedIn history contains another strand: co-founder volunteer service with the Young Entrepreneurs Club, listed from January 2008 to May 2014. It puts an interest in entrepreneurship on the record before Pagaya. Football, property and an entrepreneurs’ club make an unusual sequence. They also make it difficult to reduce him to the familiar portrait of a founder who simply saw a technical problem and opened a laptop.

Three people, three useful kinds of experience

Pagaya began in 2016 with Yulzari, Gal Krubiner and Avital Pardo. Yulzari and Krubiner’s friendship had developed in London. Their eventual partnership brought together different abilities: Krubiner’s experience in finance, Pardo’s work on algorithms and Yulzari’s background in raising capital. The business needed those abilities to meet in the same room, then survive the meetings that followed.

Early on, the founders tested their approach by investing in loans through existing peer-to-peer platforms. They could examine performance without first constructing an entire lending operation. Selling the idea to banks brought a different test: convincing people to trust an unfamiliar model. Their story includes repeated resistance to what prospective partners considered a black box. A working calculation still needed an accepted place inside someone else’s business.

That is where the commercial founder becomes easier to see. A lender and an investor can look at the same proposed loan and ask different questions. The person connecting them has to take both seriously. Technical confidence alone cannot settle a disagreement about whose money is exposed, or whose customer relationship is at stake. A company assembled around credit has to give each participant a practical reason to return.

The work between the institutions

Pagaya’s model joins lenders with institutional investors. The lender keeps the connection with its customer; Pagaya’s technology helps assess credit opportunities, while capital from investors supports loans. In a conversation about the business, Krubiner identified capital raising as Yulzari’s particular background. It is a useful detail in a company whose subject matter can make every executive sound like a data scientist.

Think about the sequence from the customer’s end. A person applies for credit through a lender. Behind that interaction sit decisions about risk, funding and whether the transaction makes economic sense. The applicant may never have a reason to know the names of the companies involved in those decisions. For the companies, however, the quality of the connections matters every time the system is used.

Yulzari’s early title, chief revenue officer, placed him on this commercial side of the enterprise. He also served as a director from the company’s founding. Those jobs put growth and responsibility alongside each other. Bringing a partner into a network is one task. Helping build an organization that can keep serving that partner is a longer assignment, with fewer ceremonial photographs.

The numbers begin to acquire commas

By April 2019, Pagaya had announced a $25 million Series C round led by Oak HC/FT. The reported total raised reached $45 million. Earlier investors participating included Viola Ventures, Clal Insurance and former American Express chief executive Harvey Golub. These names tell part of the commercial story: the young company was attracting money and attention from people with experience in established financial institutions.

At that point, the reported team numbered 50, with 40 employees in Israel. It is worth pausing on that smaller picture. A later public company can make its earlier scale feel inevitable. Fifty people is a more comprehensible number: enough for specialization, small enough for the original founders to remain conspicuous. The next stage would put their work in front of a much wider audience.

The business combination with EJF Acquisition Corp. closed on June 22, 2022. Pagaya’s shares began trading the following day under PGY. That distinction gives the jersey story its exact setting. The shirt appeared in a post on the closing date; the market debut came next. Behind an apparently effortless anecdote sat a transaction with dates, approvals and a new set of reporting obligations.

The debut arrived during turmoil in technology stocks. The transaction’s $8.5 billion valuation attracted attention, but a transaction valuation describes a moment. It does not award a company permanent exemption from business conditions. Pagaya’s public years brought the ongoing requirement to demonstrate what the network could earn, what it cost to operate and how it behaved as financial markets changed.

After the bell, the arithmetic

In May 2025, Pagaya reported its first profitable quarter as a public company: $8 million in GAAP net income attributable to its shareholders for the first quarter. Total revenue and other income reached $290 million. Network volume was $2.4 billion, roughly flat from a year earlier and below the company’s outlook. The same release therefore contained both a milestone and a reminder that different measures can move differently.

That combination makes a better account of a company than an uninterrupted procession of celebrations. Revenue measures one thing, volume another, profit another. A founder’s responsibilities continue across all three. The work behind a relationship has to be repeated under conditions that neither side entirely controls. A bank’s appetite, an investor’s requirements and the economics of a loan remain part of the conversation.

The picture had advanced again by July 30, 2026, when Pagaya reported second-quarter network volume of $3.5 billion and total revenue and other income of $387 million. GAAP net income attributable to shareholders was $45 million. These are the company’s results, produced by an organization. They give the scale of the enterprise Yulzari helped establish without turning its entire performance into one founder’s personal achievement.

A team that can outgrow its founders

Yulzari is now identified as co-founder and deputy CEO. His remit includes managing and expanding strategic relationships globally. It also includes preparing the company’s next generation of leaders and overseeing investments in startups established by Pagaya alumni. The last two responsibilities widen the frame: people who helped build one business may eventually take responsibility for a department, or begin a business of their own.

The titles in dated documents have varied. The 2025 proxy called him chief business officer; the current biography and 2026 proxy describe the deputy CEO appointment as dating to September 2024. Across those descriptions, the commercial thread remains clear. His work concerns relationships, growth and the people who will carry responsibility forward. The title is shorter than the list of conversations it implies.

His own stated ambition reaches beyond Pagaya. Reflecting publicly in 2025, he wrote that he hoped more Israeli entrepreneurs would take on the work of building financial institutions. He wanted entrepreneurs to take responsibility for the financial systems themselves. It is an aspiration about the kind of businesses an entrepreneurial community might attempt, expressed by someone whose own route into finance started elsewhere.

“We can build the systems, not just the tools.”

Yahav Yulzari · May 2025

The jersey remains a useful object to keep in view. It records a professional life with its own discipline and its own audience. The photographs of the founders record another kind of continuity: friends who became colleagues, a document in hand, a boat trip with company hoodies. Between those pictures sits Yulzari’s career. Number 22 acquired a second life. There was room in the story for more than one team.