Level

Overview

Level was a San Francisco-based fintech lender founded in 2021 by Vladimir Korshin, Asa Schachar, and Molly Hogan under the legal entity Asabase, Inc.^[1][2] The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and built a warehouse lending product for early-stage fintech startups — companies that needed debt capital to fund their own loan books but lacked the lending history required to access traditional warehouse lines.^[8]

Level ran into the same structural problem it was built to solve: lending businesses require capital to generate the performance history that unlocks more capital. With only approximately $2.3M in total equity funding, Level could not build a loan book large enough to attract institutional debt facilities, and the company ran out of runway before it could escape that constraint.^[16]

On January 11, 2023 — roughly 18 months after its YC batch — Level was acquired by Vouch, a business insurance provider for high-growth tech companies, in an acqui-hire that valued Level's underwriting technology and engineering team rather than its loan book or customer base.^[19] No acquisition price was disclosed. Crunchbase lists Level as "Closed."^[24]

Founding Story

Vladimir Korshin came to Level with a specific, firsthand diagnosis of the problem he wanted to solve. During his time at Silicon Valley Bank, Korshin worked inside the traditional venture debt system and watched a recurring pattern: strong early-stage startups — companies with real customers, real revenue, and real lending operations — were systematically denied non-dilutive financing because they were too small and too new to have a track record.^[5] Before SVB, Korshin had operated inside high-growth consumer tech companies including Facebook, Eventbrite, and Niantic, giving him both the operator's perspective on capital constraints and the lender's perspective on why those constraints existed.^[6]

Korshin articulated the core problem directly on Product Hunt at launch: "Building a lending company is challenging because it requires a lot of capital, and by far the most difficult part is getting started. You need lending history to access capital, but you can't access capital until you have a history of successful lending."^[12] The founding insight was that this chicken-and-egg problem was not inevitable — it was a market failure that a purpose-built intermediary could bridge.

To build that intermediary, Korshin assembled a team with complementary technical and product depth. Asa Schachar joined as CTO, bringing engineering leadership experience from Microsoft and Optimizely, where he had managed engineering teams.^[3] Molly Hogan joined as a co-founder, contributing over seven years of product experience leading new and international product initiatives at Amazon.^[4] Together, the three founders brought more than 30 years of collective startup experience to the company.^[7]

The founding team's credentials were well-matched to the problem: Korshin understood the debt capital markets, Schachar could build the automated underwriting infrastructure, and Hogan could shape the product experience for fintech founders navigating a complex, high-stakes process. What the team lacked — and what no amount of experience could substitute for — was the balance sheet depth that a lending business structurally requires.

The company incorporated as Asabase, Inc. and was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, establishing a clear founding window of early-to-mid 2021.^[1][8] The YC relationship brought Liquid2 Ventures in as an additional investor alongside YC's standard investment.^[17]

No public record exists of how the three co-founders first connected, and no founding narrative beyond Korshin's Product Hunt post has been published by the team.

Timeline

• Early 2021 — Level (Asabase, Inc.) founded by Vladimir Korshin, Asa Schachar, and Molly Hogan in San Francisco, CA.^[1]
• June 2021 — Level accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2021 (S21) batch.^[8]
• 2021 — Level raises Pre-Seed and Seed funding rounds totaling approximately $2.3M from Y Combinator and Liquid2 Ventures.^[16][18]
• Late 2021 — Level goes live with its first customer; within four weeks, purchases $1.3M in loans across six customers.^[15]
• January 11, 2023 — Vouch acquires Level and its engineering team in an acqui-hire. Terms not disclosed. Level ceases independent operations.^[19]