Our Story
In 1992, my dad opened Capitol Loans in Seattle. It's still there — one of the last family-owned pawn shops in the city. That shop has seen the birth of grunge, the dot-com boom, the recession, and everything in between. Over 30 years of serving the community, and at every step there were challenges. I've seen them all firsthand.
I grew up behind that counter. I learned how to read people before I learned how to read a balance sheet. Pawn shops do what banks won't — they show up for real people with real solutions, no credit check required. But the software running these shops? It's stuck in the past. The biggest names got comfortable, stopped innovating, and started locking your data behind contracts you can't get out of.
I took what I learned growing up in the shop and went to UC Berkeley to study Data Science. When PawnMaster shut down and thousands of shops got forced into software they hate, I knew it was time to come home to the industry and build something better.
PawnSight exists because pawn shops deserve the same caliber of technology that every other industry already has. Your data is yours. Your shop runs faster. And you finally get software built by someone who grew up in this business — not a tech company that's never set foot behind a counter.
— Michael Chandler, Founder