Kabbage’s Kathryn Petralia talks small business loans

English major Kathryn (Tison) Petralia ’92 talks to LendEDU about the company she co-founded in 2008, Kabbage, Inc., a fintech company specializing in issuing lines of credit to small and medium-sized businesses. She has been lauded by Forbes as one of the most powerful women in the world, and TechCrunch recognized her for “crushing it” last year. To date, the firm has financed over $4 billion to more than 130,000 businesses. Petralia comments on the startup phase of Kabbage, the market, and outlook for 2018. In the early years of the company, raising capital was the biggest challenge. “We were raising funds during the global economic crisis for a small business lender. Getting people to invest in that was pretty impossible. We did it, and it’s crazy that we did. They took a chance on us, but it was really, really hard,” she said.