- 1Parafin says it makes $10B in funding offers to small businesses each day.
- 2It has funded more than 30,000 businesses since inception.
- 3CEO Sahill Poddar has a particle physics doctorate from CERN, summa cum laude.
Parafin, the company behind DoorDash's merchant cash advance program, says it now makes $10 billion in funding offers to small businesses every day and has funded more than 30,000 businesses since it began. Its CEO and co-founder, Sahill Poddar, came to lending from particle physics.
From the Higgs boson to lending
When the trade press first reported that DoorDash had begun offering merchant cash advances in late 2021, the team behind the product was not on anyone's radar. Parafin then looked like a startup staffed by former Robinhood engineers.
Poddar's background is less typical. He earned a doctorate, summa cum laude, in particle physics at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. His work contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Before that, he was a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany.
The Peel interview
Turner Novak of The Peel hosted Poddar as a guest to discuss how Parafin came to be. The interview covers the company's path from a physics-trained founder to an embedded-capital provider with scale across small business platforms.
Source reporting: deBanked.
