Help SMBs thrive with advanced B2B payment platform

Melio was founded in 2018 by Matan Bar, co-founder and CEO, Ilan Atias, co-founder and CTO, and Ziv Paz, who is no longer with the company. Before founding Melio, Bar led the peer-to-peer payments team at PayPal, where he observed small and midsize businesses (SMBs) leveraging consumer payment platforms like Venmo and Square while continuing to use paper checks for B2B commerce. In response, Bar and Atias resolved to help businesses digitalize payment methods across the board.

Melio is headquartered in New York, with offices in Denver and a Research and Development Center in Tel Aviv. Prashant Gandhi, Melio's chief business officer, noted that before Melio became the company it is today, it helped small businesses manage their bookkeeping.

"This afforded us the opportunity to understand small businesses' pain points and develop an accounts payable and receivable tool to help small business owners spend more time growing their business and less time in the proverbial back office," he said.

Protecting, scaling small business

Melio is committed to keep small businesses in business by providing a digital B2B payments platform that saves time and improves cash flow to create quick, seamless transactions. By transforming how money is moved between businesses, Gandhi stated, the company helps SMBs focus on what really matters: growing their businesses and improving their bottom lines.

Currently, Melio employs a combined staff of 600 in its three locations, Gandhi noted. Along with Bar, Atias and Gandhi, the leadership team includes Tomer Barel, president and COO; Jonathan Polk, general counsel and chief compliance officer; Prashant Gandhi, chief business officer; and Sharon Bachar, chief people officer.

Melio's laser focus on SMBs drives the company's solutions—which Gandhi noted, are uniquely tailored for each client, whether tech startup or legacy firm—by offering free ACH bank transfers and embedding payment technology into Shopify Bill Pay and other popular platforms. These cost-effective resources provide AP and AR capabilities that help SMBs enhance efficiencies and scale their businesses, he added.

Partnership-driven growth

Melio credits its partners and investors for helping triple its valuation to $4 billion from 2021 to the present, while expanding reach through a diverse product portfolio of SMB solutions. In 2023, the company partnered with American Express Co., global fintech services provider Fiserv and ecommerce platform Shopify; it also integrated with accounting software company Xero.

Gandhi mentioned that on the product side, Melio launched real-time payments, virtual cards and its mobile B2B payment app, Pay over time, in more than 70 countries, as well as an AP solution with Capital One Business. These efforts garnered recognition in the Financial Technology Report's Top 100 Financial Technology Companies, as well as Forbes' Fintech 50 for a second consecutive year, he added.

"Melio partners with multiple platforms that already help their SMB customers accept payments online from consumers, such as Shopify and Clover," he said. "By partnering with Melio they can now offer their customers a native and intuitive experience to also pay their vendors from within their Shopify or Clover accounts."

Future-ready innovation

To help interested SMBs research Melio, the company's website, https://meliopayments.com, categorizes offerings by products, solutions, partners, resources and pricing, enabling SMBs to assess the company through multiple lenses.

Melio will continue to develop and innovate to keep small businesses in business while also looking for new ways to empower SMBs and build resiliency, Gandhi affirmed. Noting that many small businesses still manage their operations through manual processes, such as Excel spreadsheets and paper checks, he suggested embedded payments and modern, digital-first solutions can help businesses take a big step forward by leveraging software to drive automation.

"We truly believe that each of the 33,185,550 small businesses in the United States are the backbone of our economy," he said. "And they deserve best-in-class services to thrive."

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