Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Parafin
Enabling Financial Flexibility for Small Businesses
When Vineet Goel (SCS 2014) came to Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad, he was surprised by how outdated U.S. financial infrastructure was compared to his home in India. The U.S. system fails to account for digital money and frequently overlooks small businesses.
“There was an opportunity to use computer science skills to drive change and innovation in the financial world, and we could help small businesses get access to working capital,” he says.
Vineet co-founded Parafin to offer financial services to small businesses through the platforms they’re already using. Today, Parafin works with Amazon, Walmart, DoorDash and others to provide financing to hundreds of thousands of small businesses. Their underwriting model, driven by machine learning, crunches over a billion data inputs, and then makes instant loans available on the platforms business owners already use.
The needs are varied: buying new equipment, covering unexpected bills, making payroll during slow periods, or funding growth and expansion. For a seller with an Amazon storefront, accessing a loan is available right on their seller’s interface. It can be paid back automatically through a fixed percentage of future sales.
Parafin has been recognized as an emerging unicorn, continuing to excel even in a challenging economic climate. The company was founded in 2020 after Vineet and his cofounders left the investment platform Robinhood Markets, where he had been an early employee and played a key role in developing open-source tools.
But for Vineet, there’s a personal angle to his entrepreneurship.
“I come from a small business family,” he says. “My family’s business in India is in its third generation. Growing up, I saw the challenges small businesses face firsthand, and CMU gave me the skills to solve them.”
Story by Elizabeth Speed