The Exchanges

Q In terms of the business itself, you know, I was shouting to Michael about his excitement around Melio itself, and he said, you've got to ask Matan, what's the most important thing in a financial transaction business?

A That's a great question. One thing is hard to pick. There are two things that I think are top of mind for me. One is ubiquity. Any successful payment system is one that can be used by As many people as possible, anywhere, anytime. So if you think about, by the way, a paper check, one of the great things about a paper check is that anyone can write a check, and anyone can accept a check. Even if you don't have a bank account in the US, you can still accept a check. Like, you know, it's the most ubiquitous payment element, and ubiquity wins. Like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Square Cash, all these payment networks, they became ubiquitous around the US, As more and more people started using them, and that's how its winner takes all, or winner takes most, I guess, with these types of payment networks, and it's due to the importance of ubiquity. The second thing that I'll say that is like, I would say competing with ubiquity is choice. Choice is critical for any payment system. Consumers and business owners both like having choice in terms of how to pay and when to pay. People like paying with a debit card, credit card, bank transfer, wire, Paper check, virtual cards, real-time payments. There are so many types of payment methods that you can use, and each has its own disadvantages and advantages, and so providing choice is super important for any payment system, whether it's PayPal, wheth…

AI assessment note: “There are two things that I think are top of mind for me. One is ubiquity.”

Q Can I ask one thing I was thinking about? It's like the transition. Do you see customers transition partially or fully straight away in terms of their payments flows? Does it take a while for them to see the platform in action and then fully shift, or do they fully shift on day one?

A I think there's an element of trust. Milio is still not a well-known brand like PayPal. Hopefully we will be, but at the moment there's definitely an element of trust that needs to be built between Melio and its customers. So we definitely see customers test us with a few payments, seeing that the checks actually arrive or the bank transfer actually arrive, no matter how they choose to pay their suppliers. And then when trust is formed, we see a significant increase in terms of the wallet share that goes through the Melio product. So I guess we have like a couple of months where We build trust with a new customer, and then they shift all of their transactions to Melio.

AI assessment note: “we build trust with a new customer, and then they shift all of their transactions”

Q Totally. Now, I see that in terms of that trust building exercise, especially with it being such a core part of their business being cash. Can I ask, you know, it's such an exciting space, but it's also, bluntly, a pretty crowded space. You've got incumbents like Bill.com, you've got more recent players like Rootable. How do you think about competition? How do you view it more broadly?

A Yeah, I think these are great companies that has been extremely successful During the past year, build.com, I think, existed for around 15 years, so these are awesome companies. I think we decided to focus on a segment that is truly underserved. I would say these tools that you're referring to are less suitable for the segment that we've selected. We basically said there are so many small businesses in the US. There are different numbers, but let's say around eight million small businesses that are eligible, small businesses for our platform, These businesses, they see the big, fancy accounts payable automation solutions as overwhelming to use. As these tools, Bill.com, Avid Exchange, all these wonderful accounts payable automation solutions are mostly built for finance professionals, like an accountant, a bookkeeper, a finance team, and Melio is targeting these owner operators, these small businesses that do not have an internal finance professional. It's either the owner or a trusted employee that is making the payments. And so I think we've found this market that is truly underserved as owner operators, small business owners that are not finance professionals. They do not want to become finance professionals and find these other tools to be overwhelming. By the way, even the name of the category accounts payable automation solutions, the category that we're part of, that's s…

AI assessment note: “we decided to focus on a segment that is truly underserved”

Q network effects on offer here, because you have also like the data network effect where you could be a business verification system as well, or a risk assessment system. As well, you could analyze historical data as to who's failed payments before continuously and kind of build kind of credit ratings and scores even. How do you think about, like, the different network effects that are on offer to Melio?

A Yeah, so it's interesting because with PayPal or Zelle or Venmo, usually the network effect is driven by acceptance, meaning if I want to pay a friend using Venmo, in order for my friend to accept the 50 dollars, the friend needs to sign up to Venmo to accept The 50 dollars. So, it's a closed network. Once you make a payment to a friend, the friend needs to sign up to accept the payment. That's, I would say, the most natural basic element for virality for these P to P apps, and for many other payment systems in general. With B to B payments, and with Melio, it was interesting because we could not force a closed network. So, when a restaurant owner is paying its, I don't know, 15 suppliers, electricity company, the fish supplier, We need to make sure that the restaurant owner can pay each of the 15 suppliers, even if they don't want to sign up to Melio. So we need to make sure that the restaurant can pay the fish supplier, even if the fish supplier only accepts a check and doesn't want to sign up to Melio. Otherwise, the value for the restaurant owner that is paying wouldn't be so high if we only force a sign up on vendors in order to accept payments from that restaurant owner. And so we had to act in a different way. We had to make sure We leverage cash flow to encourage network effects, meaning that when we send the money or send the funds to the fish supplier, we encourage th…

AI assessment note: “We had to make sure We leverage cash flow to encourage network effects”

Q Not at all. The pleasure's all mine, but I want to kick off with some context. So I was chatting to Michael before the show, and he said, go back to traversing down Rothschild Boulevard between your office and Michael's. How did you fall upon the Melio idea, and what was that founding moment?

A That's a great story that I like reminding of. I know Michael for a while, I remember meeting him during my PayPal days. Before starting Emilio, I was with PayPal, leading its consumer payments business globally. Basically, everything related to paying friends and family using the PayPal app. Some parts of Venmo were also owned by my team, but whether it's paying back for coffee using the PayPal app or sending money to your family abroad, this was part of my team. You know, I was super passionate about consumer payments and was experiencing the digitization of how consumers pay other consumers. Consumers around the world were shifting from cash to mobile payments. We were at the right time at the right place with PayPal and my teams across San Jose and Tel Aviv, and we saw this crazy growth. And so after learning a bit about how small businesses pay other businesses, like, or how a business pays its suppliers, I was shocked to discover that the digitization that I've experienced between consumers was Hasn't happened yet in terms of how a business pays another business or how B to B payments are being done, and I remember this one number that I shared with Michael that I read the Federal Reserve research that indicated that there are around 18 trillion dollars of payments that are still transferred through paper checks between businesses in the U.S., and that was, I think, the t…

AI assessment note: “that was, I think, the trigger for me to start thinking about media”

Q In terms of the business itself, you know, I was shouting to Michael about his excitement around Melio itself, and he said, you've got to ask Matan, what's the most important thing in a financial transaction business?

A That's a great question. One thing is hard to pick. There are two things that I think are top of mind for me. One is ubiquity. Any successful payment system is one that can be used by As many people as possible, anywhere, anytime. So if you think about, by the way, a paper check, one of the great things about a paper check is that anyone can write a check, and anyone can accept a check. Even if you don't have a bank account in the US, you can still accept a check. Like, you know, it's the most ubiquitous payment element, and ubiquity wins. Like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Square Cash, all these payment networks, they became ubiquitous around the US, As more and more people started using them, and that's how its winner takes all, or winner takes most, I guess, with these types of payment networks, and it's due to the importance of ubiquity. The second thing that I'll say that is like, I would say competing with ubiquity is choice. Choice is critical for any payment system. Consumers and business owners both like having choice in terms of how to pay and when to pay. People like paying with a debit card, credit card, bank transfer, wire, Paper check, virtual cards, real-time payments. There are so many types of payment methods that you can use, and each has its own disadvantages and advantages, and so providing choice is super important for any payment system, whether it's PayPal, wheth…

AI assessment note: “There are two things that I think are top of mind for me. One is ubiquity.”

Q Can I ask one thing I was thinking about? It's like the transition. Do you see customers transition partially or fully straight away in terms of their payments flows? Does it take a while for them to see the platform in action and then fully shift, or do they fully shift on day one?

A I think there's an element of trust. Milio is still not a well-known brand like PayPal. Hopefully we will be, but at the moment there's definitely an element of trust that needs to be built between Melio and its customers. So we definitely see customers test us with a few payments, seeing that the checks actually arrive or the bank transfer actually arrive, no matter how they choose to pay their suppliers. And then when trust is formed, we see a significant increase in terms of the wallet share that goes through the Melio product. So I guess we have like a couple of months where We build trust with a new customer, and then they shift all of their transactions to Melio.

AI assessment note: “we definitely see customers test us with a few payments”

Q Not at all. The pleasure's all mine, but I want to kick off with some context. So I was chatting to Michael before the show, and he said, go back to traversing down Rothschild Boulevard between your office and Michael's. How did you fall upon the Melio idea, and what was that founding moment?

A That's a great story that I like reminding of. I know Michael for a while, I remember meeting him during my PayPal days. Before starting Emilio, I was with PayPal, leading its consumer payments business globally. Basically, everything related to paying friends and family using the PayPal app. Some parts of Venmo were also owned by my team, but whether it's paying back for coffee using the PayPal app or sending money to your family abroad, this was part of my team. You know, I was super passionate about consumer payments and was experiencing the digitization of how consumers pay other consumers. Consumers around the world were shifting from cash to mobile payments. We were at the right time at the right place with PayPal and my teams across San Jose and Tel Aviv, and we saw this crazy growth. And so after learning a bit about how small businesses pay other businesses, like, or how a business pays its suppliers, I was shocked to discover that the digitization that I've experienced between consumers was Hasn't happened yet in terms of how a business pays another business or how B to B payments are being done, and I remember this one number that I shared with Michael that I read the Federal Reserve research that indicated that there are around 18 trillion dollars of payments that are still transferred through paper checks between businesses in the U.S., and that was, I think, the t…

AI assessment note: “that was, I think, the trigger for me to start thinking about media”

Q the corner or being able to provide advice with the wisdom that they've seen beforehand. I'm intrigued when we think about your board, there's some very opinionated characters on the board, which is always great. But I want to start with one from Michael, actually, uh, from Olaf, who's obviously on your board, and he said, how do you try and use your board most effectively today? Let's start there.

A Yeah, so luckily, we have a few incredible investors that are very different from one another. From our seed days to today, our investors are very different in terms of what they care about, what they focus on. I think with startups, everybody talks about all the right things all the time, but it's very hard to To get the external view on what are the key priorities? What is the most important thing at the moment? There are so many things happening at any given time. And I think what we saw with our board of directors is that in terms of understanding focus areas or getting an external perspective from folks that are not in the day to day saying, hey, I think there isn't enough focus on X, or you're putting too much focus on Y. I think these are great conversation starters, and then we follow up, and we start thinking whether this is correct or not correct, but many times, I can give you an example. We had one investor that told us, hey, you're not diverse enough. What's going on? This is not a way to build the company, and we talked about the product and features and UI. We didn't talk about diversity when we were 10 people, but that, like, caught us, and we said, what is going on? Today, we're 200 people, 49% women, 51% men. This was the seed for us to become a Truly diverse company. Most of our leadership are women. And so I really think that we call ourselves said, we need …

AI assessment note: “in terms of understanding focus areas or getting an external perspective from folks”

Q Can I ask, with ubiquity comes volume, and one thing that when I spoke to Michael and the team at Cotu, and actually Julian, it was like, This constant question, which is, how do you think about the balance between volume versus revenue, and where do you land when you think about driving one or the other?

A It's a strategic question that we keep revisiting or debating every once in a while, as it really determines the product roadmap, it determines the type of people that we hire, it determines everything, and I think for us, or for a company, a young company like Melio, growth is definitely the number one priority. We're obviously a business that Aspires to have like great returns for all shareholders and investors. So obviously revenue is top of mind, but the strategy to become a very successful business is to think growth first. And the reason is actually a little bit related to the network effect that I was referring to with Zelle and Venmo and Square Cash. I think when you build a payment system accurately, you can actually grow at a super fast pace and Usually within payment systems, when both sides are within the network, the value increases for each of these sides. And so I think enabling or focusing on growth, expanding the network, leveraging or doubling down on the network effect efforts are just, I would say, more important at the phase like ours compared to finding another revenue source. We do have a strategy around Our revenue sources and the different values that we can provide our users to also monetize the business. But I think there's a very clear set of revenue opportunities that are shared across payment systems. The growth element is unique to Melio compared …

AI assessment note: “for a company, a young company like Melio, growth is definitely the number one priority.”

Q life, but, um, I do have to ask, you know, if we take that one step further, then you have that idea and you go, shit, there's no brand for ACH. You then think about kind of building out the founding team. And Michael told me that this maybe wasn't an obvious process. So how did you choose your co-founders? And why do you think it was maybe not obvious?

A Yeah, so I'm lucky to have chosen great co-founders, Ilan and Ziv. I think we've decided to work together in terms of our shared values. Like, we decided to work together before we had a specific concept in mind. We, I think, liked to work with one another. We got along well, and I've seen incredible traits with these partners, like resilience, like our ability to manage a debate, which, similar to, uh, maybe a good marriage, When you have shared values, marriage is easier, and same for choosing partners to start a new company. So we definitely decided to work together based on shared values, and luckily, these two are the smartest people that I know, so that also helps. In terms of the concept itself, we just thought about different directions, mostly within fintech, because that's, you know, the world that I came from, and I learned the importance of money. To people and businesses. So our focus was mostly around fintech, but there wasn't a specific idea in mind.

AI assessment note: “we decided to work together before we had a specific concept in mind”

Q life, but, um, I do have to ask, you know, if we take that one step further, then you have that idea and you go, shit, there's no brand for ACH. You then think about kind of building out the founding team. And Michael told me that this maybe wasn't an obvious process. So how did you choose your co-founders? And why do you think it was maybe not obvious?

A Yeah, so I'm lucky to have chosen great co-founders, Ilan and Ziv. I think we've decided to work together in terms of our shared values. Like, we decided to work together before we had a specific concept in mind. We, I think, liked to work with one another. We got along well, and I've seen incredible traits with these partners, like resilience, like our ability to manage a debate, which, similar to, uh, maybe a good marriage, When you have shared values, marriage is easier, and same for choosing partners to start a new company. So we definitely decided to work together based on shared values, and luckily, these two are the smartest people that I know, so that also helps. In terms of the concept itself, we just thought about different directions, mostly within fintech, because that's, you know, the world that I came from, and I learned the importance of money. To people and businesses. So our focus was mostly around fintech, but there wasn't a specific idea in mind.

AI assessment note: “we decided to work together before we had a specific concept in mind”

Q Can I ask, with ubiquity comes volume, and one thing that when I spoke to Michael and the team at Cotu, and actually Julian, it was like, This constant question, which is, how do you think about the balance between volume versus revenue, and where do you land when you think about driving one or the other?

A It's a strategic question that we keep revisiting or debating every once in a while, as it really determines the product roadmap, it determines the type of people that we hire, it determines everything, and I think for us, or for a company, a young company like Melio, growth is definitely the number one priority. We're obviously a business that Aspires to have like great returns for all shareholders and investors. So obviously revenue is top of mind, but the strategy to become a very successful business is to think growth first. And the reason is actually a little bit related to the network effect that I was referring to with Zelle and Venmo and Square Cash. I think when you build a payment system accurately, you can actually grow at a super fast pace and Usually within payment systems, when both sides are within the network, the value increases for each of these sides. And so I think enabling or focusing on growth, expanding the network, leveraging or doubling down on the network effect efforts are just, I would say, more important at the phase like ours compared to finding another revenue source. We do have a strategy around Our revenue sources and the different values that we can provide our users to also monetize the business. But I think there's a very clear set of revenue opportunities that are shared across payment systems. The growth element is unique to Melio compared …

AI assessment note: “growth is definitely the number one priority... strategy to become a very successful business is to think growth first”

Q Can I ask, you mentioned that, a 170 people within a year. What are the biggest challenges of adding one person every other day, essentially?

A Yeah, it's a crazy journey, which we love. The challenge is, I guess, I won't say anything unique, but the challenge is to maintain the culture. When we, uh, were 30 people, I remember telling our team, guys, the culture of this team, of this company, will be dictated by your personalities. The 30 people that joined us, their personalities are the core of the company's personality. You know, it's like taking a baby versus a elderly man. I can easily affect my one-year-old baby's personality. It will be very hard for me to affect my eighty-two-years-old father's personality. He's already set in terms of his values, and I think it's also true for companies. Like, when you're young, when you recruit the The first 30, the first 100, the first 200, this is the time to shape the values and the norms that the company will have. Whether it's how you talk in meetings, whether you're inclusive or not, whether you're diverse or not, it's very hard to change this when you're 5000. It's possible, but it's just a lot harder.

AI assessment note: “the challenge is to maintain the culture”

Q the corner or being able to provide advice with the wisdom that they've seen beforehand. I'm intrigued when we think about your board, there's some very opinionated characters on the board, which is always great. But I want to start with one from Michael, actually, uh, from Olaf, who's obviously on your board, and he said, how do you try and use your board most effectively today? Let's start there.

A Yeah, so luckily, we have a few incredible investors that are very different from one another. From our seed days to today, our investors are very different in terms of what they care about, what they focus on. I think with startups, everybody talks about all the right things all the time, but it's very hard to To get the external view on what are the key priorities? What is the most important thing at the moment? There are so many things happening at any given time. And I think what we saw with our board of directors is that in terms of understanding focus areas or getting an external perspective from folks that are not in the day to day saying, hey, I think there isn't enough focus on X, or you're putting too much focus on Y. I think these are great conversation starters, and then we follow up, and we start thinking whether this is correct or not correct, but many times, I can give you an example. We had one investor that told us, hey, you're not diverse enough. What's going on? This is not a way to build the company, and we talked about the product and features and UI. We didn't talk about diversity when we were 10 people, but that, like, caught us, and we said, what is going on? Today, we're 200 people, 49% women, 51% men. This was the seed for us to become a Truly diverse company. Most of our leadership are women. And so I really think that we call ourselves said, we need …

AI assessment note: “in terms of understanding focus areas or getting an external perspective”

Q It's asking you to pick a favorite child. I get it. It's tough. Final one. What do the next five years look like for you and for Emilio? How big could it be, and what's that picture?

A Our mission is to keep small business in business, and we do that with simple B to B payments that maximize cash flow and minimize busy work, and I think the next five years is when the 18 trillion, or whatever number you choose of, some research says, 18 trillion dollars of paper checks They will decrease to zero. There's no doubt about it. B to B will follow the digitization of C to C and online retail. It's a matter of who will do that. Like who will drive this digitization, whether it's Melio, our competitors, new competitors that we don't know of yet, that haven't started yet. And so we're working very hard to fulfill our mission to keep small business in business and become the leading B to B payments platform in the U S digitization will happen. And Melio is there to work hard to accelerate that.

AI assessment note: “become the leading B to B payments platform in the U S”

Q to that, though, I do have to ask, you know, in terms of the advice that they give, there's the challenge of, like, you know, what to ingest versus what to not ingest. How do you think around what advice, when listening to your board, that you trust your instincts on and actually ignore, versus what to ingest and act upon? How do you kind of debate between the two?

A Yeah, there are, I think, specific areas that we get more advice on Than other areas. And it depends on the founding team. So for example, we're three founders that are very product oriented. Product, user experience, design. And so I think we rarely hear feedback on product. The board is not interested to give us feedback on product. I think they feel confident and they are right. See, this is an area where we have enough resources that we consult with, and we have enough experience to be good on product. But for example, scaling a team or which leaders to hire is Or which type of CFO should I hire? This is not something that I had experience with, you know, at PayPal or eBay or at my first startup that got acquired by eBay. So there are certain areas where our investors just have seen a lot. They've seen a lot of mistakes, and so there the feedback is priceless. But, you know, like any team, you need to make sure you have a good set of investors, and they give good advices and not bad advices, and their feedback is accurate. So luckily for us, the feedback is accurate, but there are certain topics like Which CFO to hire? Or when is the time to hire a CFO? You know, these are questions that I found super helpful to discuss with our board.

AI assessment note: “we're three founders that are very product oriented... rarely hear feedback on product.”

Q you a tough one that's off schedule, but it's like, how do you think about when's the right time to bring out a next product? You know, a very obvious next product would be lending in terms of providing that capital ahead of cash flow, and you have all the data to provide it relatively risk-free. How do you think about when's the right time to build out ancillary products?

A Yeah, we keep thinking about the right approach for this, but definitely offering credit is extension for our payment system. PayPal offered PayPal credit, and Square offered Square Capital. It is, I would say, a very integral part to a high engagement payment system, so we're definitely thinking about it. I think we're most likely going to partner with a company that is doing credit well in order to provide this service as a Our focus is to become the best B to B payments platform and user experience, and that's a lot of work already. So getting into credit underwriting and having funds on our balance sheet is something that is probably relatively complicated or defocusing in terms of our product strategy. So this is probably a partnership rather than a build decision, but definitely something that we're aiming on building and have concrete plans on.

AI assessment note: “this is probably a partnership rather than a build decision”

Q Before we dive into the quickfire, this wasn't on the schedule, but 49% in terms of female to male ratio. I mean, that's pretty incredible. So my question to you is like, what have you done that others haven't to make you succeed where others haven't?

A So first, we made a real effort. I think everybody talks about The importance of culture. Everybody talks about the importance of diversity, but diversity is very easy to measure. Gender diversity and race diversity, and so we just worked hard to create a real equality of opportunity. So we didn't aspire to get to fifty-fifty. I don't think that's the right way to do that. I think the right way for us was to make sure that, for Find Melio, or be comfortable joining Melio, handling different concerns that might be relevant for female engineers, that might not be relevant for male engineers. For example, many young mothers after a maternity leave are very concerned to go and start working at a startup, because a startup is considered to be a hectic environment, and so a corporate might be a more comfortable environment for someone after maternity leave to And so we created programs to create a lot of flexibility for young mothers that came back after maternity leave so that they can actually have a very balanced graduation into back to work. And we did the same with paternity leave as well, but I think we found that especially women after maternity leave are super concerned about getting back to startup more than men. And it's true for Israel and also So we created this program to encourage that. We also became very active in terms of different conferences and events that are ori…

AI assessment note: “we created programs to create a lot of flexibility for young mothers”

Q Can I ask you the question, which is like, you know, you came from large organizations, like you said, that with PayPal is scaling from 30 to 200 within a year. It's a lot for a leader to digest. How do you deal with, like, self-doubt as a leader?

A Luckily, I have a great leadership team. So I trust our leaders with many of their decisions and consult with them on an ongoing basis. So I think working as a team or having a strong leadership makes things easier. Again, it's a very obvious insight, but a very true insight. So I think my two co-founders, Ilan and Ziv, and the leadership that joined us, our VP product, VP business, VP growth, Like, all these wonderful folks that decided to join us, this makes the journey easier. I think without a strong leadership, we couldn't have grown from 30 to 200, and that's a very important foundation that luckily we set at an early phase, but we're still on it, like we're missing a lot of new leaders, so it's an ongoing task, obviously. And so I think self-doubt, having a strong team to consult with, we do have a naturally inclusive culture, so we do Make decisions. We do have open, honest, and direct conversations about different dilemmas. So that just helps with being fully aware and just feel comfortable with the different doubts that we have, obviously, on a daily basis.

AI assessment note: “having a strong team to consult with, we do have a naturally inclusive culture”

Q Can I ask you the question, which is like, you know, you came from large organizations, like you said, that with PayPal is scaling from 30 to 200 within a year. It's a lot for a leader to digest. How do you deal with, like, self-doubt as a leader?

A Luckily, I have a great leadership team. So I trust our leaders with many of their decisions and consult with them on an ongoing basis. So I think working as a team or having a strong leadership makes things easier. Again, it's a very obvious insight, but a very true insight. So I think my two co-founders, Ilan and Ziv, and the leadership that joined us, our VP product, VP business, VP growth, Like, all these wonderful folks that decided to join us, this makes the journey easier. I think without a strong leadership, we couldn't have grown from 30 to 200, and that's a very important foundation that luckily we set at an early phase, but we're still on it, like we're missing a lot of new leaders, so it's an ongoing task, obviously. And so I think self-doubt, having a strong team to consult with, we do have a naturally inclusive culture, so we do Make decisions. We do have open, honest, and direct conversations about different dilemmas. So that just helps with being fully aware and just feel comfortable with the different doubts that we have, obviously, on a daily basis.

AI assessment note: “helps with being fully aware and just feel comfortable with the different doubts”

Q you a tough one that's off schedule, but it's like, how do you think about when's the right time to bring out a next product? You know, a very obvious next product would be lending in terms of providing that capital ahead of cash flow, and you have all the data to provide it relatively risk-free. How do you think about when's the right time to build out ancillary products?

A Yeah, we keep thinking about the right approach for this, but definitely offering credit is extension for our payment system. PayPal offered PayPal credit, and Square offered Square Capital. It is, I would say, a very integral part to a high engagement payment system, so we're definitely thinking about it. I think we're most likely going to partner with a company that is doing credit well in order to provide this service as a Our focus is to become the best B to B payments platform and user experience, and that's a lot of work already. So getting into credit underwriting and having funds on our balance sheet is something that is probably relatively complicated or defocusing in terms of our product strategy. So this is probably a partnership rather than a build decision, but definitely something that we're aiming on building and have concrete plans on.

AI assessment note: “getting into credit underwriting and having funds on our balance sheet is something that is probably relatively complicated”

Q such a big market to go after, and, you know, you need to raise money to go after such a big market. You raised a hundred and forty-four million dollars, and the interesting thing for me is you remained in stealth until that moment, and so I have to ask here, how would you describe your fundraising strategy, and why did you decide to stay in stealth for so long?

A There are, I think, less of a strategy. If I'm being, like, fully transparent, like, I can't say that we had, like, a very consistent Fundraising strategy, but more of a setting goals and understanding the resources that we need to get to these goals and then deciding whether to fundraise or not. I think we grew a lot faster than we've expected over the last year. We realized that the goals that we've set beginning of 20 20 are completely irrelevant and we can do a lot more, can capture more of the market, but we would need more engineers. We would need more marketing. We would need more salespeople. So we started, I remember, like, preparing this very simple model with the new goals that we've set, and we suddenly realized that we need a lot more funds in order to hire the team that we want to hire, and so that was a trigger for us to say, okay, we need to be, or we can be more aggressive, and now is the right time to raise the funds, and that's why we did it. That's what happened in August when we raised our round C, but then we continued to accelerate our growth, and then the goal that we've set back in July was Already seems to moderate. And we thought to ourselves, hey, we can grow a lot faster. We can add a lot more value to our customers than what we do today. So we decided to raise money again in order to make sure that we can expand the team at the pace that we want to…

AI assessment note: “I can't say that we had, like, a very consistent Fundraising strategy”

Q such a big market to go after, and, you know, you need to raise money to go after such a big market. You raised a hundred and forty-four million dollars, and the interesting thing for me is you remained in stealth until that moment, and so I have to ask here, how would you describe your fundraising strategy, and why did you decide to stay in stealth for so long?

A There are, I think, less of a strategy. If I'm being, like, fully transparent, like, I can't say that we had, like, a very consistent Fundraising strategy, but more of a setting goals and understanding the resources that we need to get to these goals and then deciding whether to fundraise or not. I think we grew a lot faster than we've expected over the last year. We realized that the goals that we've set beginning of 20 20 are completely irrelevant and we can do a lot more, can capture more of the market, but we would need more engineers. We would need more marketing. We would need more salespeople. So we started, I remember, like, preparing this very simple model with the new goals that we've set, and we suddenly realized that we need a lot more funds in order to hire the team that we want to hire, and so that was a trigger for us to say, okay, we need to be, or we can be more aggressive, and now is the right time to raise the funds, and that's why we did it. That's what happened in August when we raised our round C, but then we continued to accelerate our growth, and then the goal that we've set back in July was Already seems to moderate. And we thought to ourselves, hey, we can grow a lot faster. We can add a lot more value to our customers than what we do today. So we decided to raise money again in order to make sure that we can expand the team at the pace that we want to…

AI assessment note: “I can't say that we had, like, a very consistent Fundraising strategy”