E
yal Shinar, Tomer Michaeli, and Yuval Ariav founded Fundbox in 2013 to help optimize cash flow for small businesses and freelancers with outstanding invoices. The cofounders believed they could outcompete traditional lending companies by leveraging big data analytics and predictive modeling to help serve their customers faster and at lower costs. The idea for the company was partially inspired by Shinar's mother, who struggled with late payments at the employment agency that she owned and operated in Israel.
After a year of operating in stealth mode, the company officially launched to the public in April 2014. Its primary offering was a cash flow optimization tool that provided advanced capital to small businesses and freelancers against outstanding invoices. These advances were intended to help business owners seeking to optimize cash flow and run their businesses successfully while waiting for customers to pay outstanding accounts receivable invoices.
In the summer of 2016, Prashant Fuloria had recently left Yahoo, where he served as the senior vice president of advertising products. He had been with the company for a little more than a year after Yahoo had acquired Flurry, a data analytics start-up where Fuloria served as chief product officer (for a biography of Prashant Fuloria, see Appendix 2).
As it so happened, the Fundbox cofounders were in the midst of a search for a senior executive to help scale the company. Through a connection at Khosla Ventures, Fuloria and Shinar agreed to meet to discuss the potential of working together.
Fuloria had experience working with a number of start-ups and large technology enterprises like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. In the summer of 2016, he decided it was time to apply his learnings to Fundbox, the quickly growing financial technology company.
| Announced Date | Round | Number of Investors | Money Raised |
| Mar 6, 2018 | Secondary Market | — | — |
| Sept 10, 2015 | Series C | 10 | $50M |
| Mar 19, 2015 | Series B | 9 | $40M |
| Apr 10, 2014 | Series A | 7 | $17.5M |
Fuloria was first attracted to Fundbox by the company’s mission of helping small businesses succeed and realize their full potential by giving them access to financial tools that would otherwise be out of their reach. To Fuloria, this mission sat within a more prominent question around how technology might be used to help small businesses. He knew that small businesses were an essential part of the economy and society, but one thing he had always wondered about throughout his career working at companies like Facebook, Yahoo, and Google was this: “Which type of organization benefits most from technological innovation—small businesses or larger enterprises?”