Executive Summary
Background
Gal Krubiner was a serial entrepreneur and investment banker before co-founding Pagaya at age 26. He worked at UBS in London and Zurich, first in electronic currency trading and later serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, an experience that gave him a close view of how capital moved through institutional markets and where its incentives were misaligned with the underlying borrowers those markets served. Krubiner has described Pagaya's founding vision as connecting that institutional capital expertise with the technical capabilities of two friends he had known for years: Avital Pardo and Yahav Yulzari. Team8's account of the founding describes the three arriving at their business idea over a long, argumentative road trip, each bringing a different perspective on where the opportunity actually was.
Role and company
Krubiner co-founded Pagaya Technologies with Avital Pardo, who serves as chief technology officer and deputy CEO, and Yahav Yulzari, who serves as chief revenue officer and deputy CEO, and has served as chief executive officer since the company's incorporation in Israel on March 20, 2016. Pagaya operates from dual headquarters in New York and Tel Aviv, and Krubiner has continued to lead its quarterly earnings calls alongside President Sanjiv Das and Chief Financial Officer Evangelos Perros as the company has scaled as a public entity with roughly 389 employees operating across five countries, including Israel, Poland, Canada, and Portugal.
Career and company-building context
Pardo brought hard-core data-science expertise from Fundbox, where he built alternative underwriting models and saw firsthand where traditional credit scoring fell short, while Yulzari brought a capital-raising background; Krubiner has said the three debated the business problem extensively before settling on their approach. Under his leadership, Pagaya built proprietary AI models trained on data drawn across its network of lending partners, rather than any single partner's own portfolio, and Pagaya takes on the resulting credit risk itself through capital raised from institutional investors, letting a partner lender approve more of its applicant pool without expanding its own balance sheet. Krubiner has told McKinsey that this network structure was designed deliberately so that Pagaya's incentives stay aligned with the long-run performance of the loans it helps originate, rather than only the volume of applications it processes.
Public milestones
In September 2021, Pagaya announced a merger with EJF Acquisition Corp. that valued the company at approximately $8.5 billion; the transaction closed in June 2022, and Pagaya began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker PGY. Krubiner discussed the company's founding and strategy publicly in a McKinsey interview in 2022, and has continued to lead Pagaya's investor communications through its post-listing growth, including its Decline Monetization product, which lets lending partners automatically route rejected applications into Pagaya's network for a second evaluation, alongside its Affiliate Optimizer Engine and Direct Marketing Engine products for customer acquisition.
Why their work matters
Pagaya's network model is a useful contrast to direct AI lenders and to underwriting-software vendors alike: rather than making the credit decision and holding the resulting loan itself, or simply selling software a bank uses to make its own decision, Pagaya integrates via API and absorbs the risk through outside institutional capital. That structure means a lending partner can expand approvals without expanding its own balance-sheet exposure, a distinction that matters for readers trying to map how differently AI lending companies are actually structured beneath similar-sounding "AI-driven underwriting" marketing language, and Krubiner's continued public framing of the model around aligned incentives is a useful lens for evaluating whether similar network-based lending structures elsewhere are built the same way.
Sources
This profile draws on Krubiner's own account of Pagaya's founding in a McKinsey-published interview, Yahoo Finance's listing of Pagaya's executive team and founding date sourced from company filings, and Team8's feature on the founding relationship between Krubiner, Pardo, and Yulzari. Financial details are limited to the SPAC merger valuation and listing facts independently reported at the time, and employee and geographic figures are drawn from Pagaya's own disclosed company data.
Background
Gal Krubiner was a serial entrepreneur and investment banker before co-founding Pagaya at age 26. He worked at UBS in London and Zurich, first in electronic currency trading and later serving ultra-high-net-worth clients, an experience that gave him a close view of how capital moved through institutional markets and where its incentives were misaligned with the underlying borrowers those markets served. Krubiner has described Pagaya’s founding vision as connecting that institutional capital expertise with the technical capabilities of two friends he had known for years: Avital Pardo and Yahav Yulzari. Team8’s account of the founding describes the three arriving at their business idea over a long, argumentative road trip, each bringing a different perspective on where the opportunity actually was.
Role and company
Krubiner co-founded Pagaya Technologies with Avital Pardo, who serves as chief technology officer and deputy CEO, and Yahav Yulzari, who serves as chief revenue officer and deputy CEO, and has served as chief executive officer since the company’s incorporation in Israel on March 20, 2016. Pagaya operates from dual headquarters in New York and Tel Aviv, and Krubiner has continued to lead its quarterly earnings calls alongside President Sanjiv Das and Chief Financial Officer Evangelos Perros as the company has scaled as a public entity with roughly 389 employees operating across five countries, including Israel, Poland, Canada, and Portugal.
Career and company-building context
Pardo brought hard-core data-science expertise from Fundbox, where he built alternative underwriting models and saw firsthand where traditional credit scoring fell short, while Yulzari brought a capital-raising background; Krubiner has said the three debated the business problem extensively before settling on their approach. Under his leadership, Pagaya built proprietary AI models trained on data drawn across its network of lending partners, rather than any single partner’s own portfolio, and Pagaya takes on the resulting credit risk itself through capital raised from institutional investors, letting a partner lender approve more of its applicant pool without expanding its own balance sheet. Krubiner has told McKinsey that this network structure was designed deliberately so that Pagaya’s incentives stay aligned with the long-run performance of the loans it helps originate, rather than only the volume of applications it processes.
Public milestones
In September 2021, Pagaya announced a merger with EJF Acquisition Corp. that valued the company at approximately $8.5 billion; the transaction closed in June 2022, and Pagaya began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker PGY. Krubiner discussed the company’s founding and strategy publicly in a McKinsey interview in 2022, and has continued to lead Pagaya’s investor communications through its post-listing growth, including its Decline Monetization product, which lets lending partners automatically route rejected applications into Pagaya’s network for a second evaluation, alongside its Affiliate Optimizer Engine and Direct Marketing Engine products for customer acquisition.
Why their work matters
Pagaya’s network model is a useful contrast to direct AI lenders and to underwriting-software vendors alike: rather than making the credit decision and holding the resulting loan itself, or simply selling software a bank uses to make its own decision, Pagaya integrates via API and absorbs the risk through outside institutional capital. That structure means a lending partner can expand approvals without expanding its own balance-sheet exposure, a distinction that matters for readers trying to map how differently AI lending companies are actually structured beneath similar-sounding “AI-driven underwriting” marketing language, and Krubiner’s continued public framing of the model around aligned incentives is a useful lens for evaluating whether similar network-based lending structures elsewhere are built the same way.
Sources
This profile draws on Krubiner’s own account of Pagaya’s founding in a McKinsey-published interview, Yahoo Finance’s listing of Pagaya’s executive team and founding date sourced from company filings, and Team8’s feature on the founding relationship between Krubiner, Pardo, and Yulzari. Financial details are limited to the SPAC merger valuation and listing facts independently reported at the time, and employee and geographic figures are drawn from Pagaya’s own disclosed company data.
