Fundbox recently hired a chief technology officer and chief product officer as annual revenue growth exceeds 50%, spurred by partnerships with Visa, Intuit, Stripe and SoFi’s Galileo.
The company that helps small business owners manage their cash flow with flexible financing and expense management services has made additional C-suite hires this year to keep up with the growth.
“As Fundbox continues to mature, it becomes critical for us to bring on talent with deep operational knowledge in scaling long-term, durable businesses,” said Fundbox CEO Prashant Fuloria.
Fundbox, founded in 2013, said this week that it hired tech veteran Ofer Karp as its chief technology officer and general manager of the company’s Tel Aviv office, where he’s based.
“Growing up, I saw my parents struggle with the day-to-day challenges of being small business owners,” Karp said. “It’s been a goal of mine to work at a company that supports small businesses.”
Karp came over from Israeli tech company WalkMe Ltd., where he was executive vice president of engineering. Earlier in his career he worked at Hewlett Packard, which he joined through HP’s acquisition of Mercury Interactive.
In March, Fundbox hiredSteve Greig from Visa as chief marketing officer; Rebecca Sachs from Conde Nast as chief people officer; and Iskender Eguz from Capital One as chief risk officer.
Fundbox also recently hiredJin Hwang as chief product officer. He came over from Marcus by Goldman Sachs. Earlier in his career, Hwang led the product team at Intuit QuickBooks Capital, where Fundbox first came to his attention about six years ago.
Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU), one of Fundbox’s longest partners, embeds Fundbox within the QuickBooks application.
“Fundbox has received strong traction with partners, because we’re able to serve their end customers well,” Fuloria said. “Ultimately, what the partner is looking for is to deliver value to their customers. In the case of the QuickBooks platform, they’re looking for their customers to get easy access to working capital.”
The vast majority of businesses are on the small end — sole proprietors to companies employing up to a dozen employees.
“This is where all the volume is, and coincidentally, this is also the most underserved part of the market because traditional approaches of serving these customers have been very human-capital intensive,” Fuloria said. “It’s very expensive for a traditional provider to actually serve these customers, which is where you need technology and automation to be able to scale.
“We knew that the market is huge and the only way that we could maximize our impact would be to not only go it alone with our own direct channels, but also to partner with those already serving small businesses.”
Partnerships struck this year include teaming up with Visa (NYSE: V) to launch in May the Fundbox Flex Visa debit card. Also in May, Fundbox struck a deal with Stripe to include Fundbox’s working capital platform in the larger fintech’s platform. In June, Fundbox partnered with SoFi’s Galileo Financial Technologies, an open API platform, as part of its efforts to further expand its working capital platform.
Endo International files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, agrees to sell to creditors for $With more than half of Fundbox’s business coming through partnerships, Fundbox’s year-over-year revenue grew more than 55% in 2021, with growth on a similar trajectory this year, Fuloria said, adding that annual revenue now exceeds $160 million. Fundbox enjoys a powerful advantage in serving small businesses.
“Every Fundbox customer has a real time, always-on data connection with Fundbox, so as our customers’ businesses evolve, we see their evolution happening in real time,” Fuloria said. “We have very good visibility into what’s happening with our customers and very often with the counterparties they trade with.”
The company, founded in 2013, now employs 350 people at its offices in Israel, San Francisco, New York and in the Dallas suburb of Plano, where the greatest concentration of its employees are located.
“We continue to hire, but we’re also mindful of the overall economy and hiring selectively in certain functions,” Fuloria said, adding that the company plans to continue operating in a "virtual first" manner until September — of 2023.$SoFi Technologies Inc.(SOFI)$
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