Our Story
In 1992, my dad opened Capitol Loans on a Seattle street corner — and it never closed its doors. It grew up with grunge, when the neighborhood still felt like ours. It grew up with the dot-com gold rush, when money flowed so fast people forgot places like this existed. It was still there for the recession, when they remembered. Thirty years and counting, still family-owned, still standing — one of the last of its kind.
I grew up inside those walls. Before I could sound out words on a page, I was learning to read something harder — the person standing across the counter. The desperate. The proud. The ones the banks had already turned away.
A pawn shop, at its best, is not a last resort. It is the only lender in America that looks a stranger in the eye, asks no questions about their credit score, and says yes.
But the industry that served those people so well was being served poorly in return. The software that ran our shops hadn't meaningfully changed in years. The biggest vendors grew fat and comfortable, stopped listening, and buried their customers' own data behind contracts designed to be impossible to leave.
I took what the shop had taught me and carried it to UC Berkeley, where I studied Data Science. When PawnMaster sunset and thousands of shops were herded onto platforms they never chose, I understood something with the clarity that only comes from having grown up in a thing: it was time to go home.
I built PawnSight on a simple conviction — that pawn shops deserve technology as good as the people who run them. That your data belongs to you. That your shop should move at the speed of your instincts, not your software. And that there is no substitute, none, for building something when you already know what it feels like to stand behind the counter.
I'm bringing the choices back to you. You have the power. You have the vision. PawnSight is just the tool that finally keeps up.
And one more thing: we're not a big software company. We're not backed by venture capital. We're not going to get acquired and force you onto some platform you didn't choose. PawnSight is a family business, built for family businesses. When you call PawnSight, you get me.
— Michael Chandler, Founder