Our Founding Story.
Our Founding Story.
As founders, Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia had experienced their share of hiring issues, from lengthy recruiting cycles to high attrition. They wanted to find a solution that would not only curb today’s retention and recruiting issues, but bring long-lasting financial freedom to employees. Together, they embarked on a mission to find out what leaders in the human resources sector needed that employer-forgivable loans didn’t bring to the table. They approached that core audience with the idea of Keep Financial. HR leaders all said, ‘Hey, if this was available to us, we’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s just really hard to execute.’ Rob and Kathryn decided to take all the execution challenges out and so Keep was born.
Rob Frohwein
Co-founder & Chief Keeper
Rob Frohwein recently co-founded Keep Financial to eliminate the recruiting and retention challenges facing nearly every employer in the world.
Prior to Keep, Rob co-founded, and was the long serving CEO of Kabbage, a pioneering small business fintech, which raised $400m in equity, served 500,000 U.S. small businesses and delivered $16B in capital prior to its sale to American Express in October 2020. Rob is an inventor on 17 U.S. patents, has written three books on intellectual property, co-hosted a talk format radio show on work & careers, and was named a Top 50 CEO by Glassdoor in 2018. He also holds a lifetime visitor’s pass to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which he earned in connection with one of his earliest entrepreneurial endeavors.
Kathryn Petralia
Prior to Keep, Kathryn Co-Founded Kabbage, a financial services platform for small businesses acquired by American Express in 2020. Prior to Kabbage, Kathryn spent nearly 15 years with fintech and ecommerce startups. In 2018, she was named to Forbes’ list of the World’s Most Powerful Women.
Kathryn serves on the boards of CARE, Tricolor, CoreCard, Near, PadSplit, The Woodruff Arts Center (trustee), and the Atlanta Chamber Music Festival.
