Fundbox founder Eyal Shinar to become Executive Chairman, Prashant Fuloria promoted to new CEO

Eyal Shinar, the founder of Fundbox, is leaving his position as CEO of the company and will become its chairman, the company announced Thursday.

The position of CEO will go to Prashant Fuloria, who until now served as COO of the Fintech company and previously served in senior positions at Google and Facebook. In addition, the company announced that Arbor Ventures founder Melissa Guzy is joining the board of directors.

Founded in 2013, Fundbox provides credit and payments solutions for small businesses. In September 2019, the company raised $179 million in round C funding and in May this year expanded the round by another $20 million.

In an interview with Calcalist, Shinar said that the decision to step down as CEO was formed before the Coronavirus pandemic, but was postponed to ensure the transition was made in a period of stability for the company. “We thought we would have to enter survival mode, however, in practice, not only did the company survive, but we experienced unanticipated growth. By May, the company was in a better place than we predicted prior to the crisis,” said Shinar.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he added. “The change was made so I could focus on the long-term strategy rather than managing people. We want to go public and preparing for the offering requires extending the scale of revenue that will bring us to profitability, alongside developing new products to show continued growth even after the IPO.”

One of Fundbox main focus points at the moment is acquisitions and the company is seriously considering some purchase options. “A lot of companies have experienced distress due to the current crisis and we are looking at acquisition opportunities. We are strategically looking at what we will be missing two years from now and what we can build in house, whether in the field of payments, credit, or other things that serve small businesses.”

Asked whether he was interested in acquiring a single company or several, Shinar wouldn’t commit.

“It depends. If it's a company with a lot of employees regardless of its cost, it's something that's hard for an organization to digest. When you buy a company, the price matters less than how complex its integration is. If it's a company that employs about the same amount of people as yours, you do not want to do more than one such acquisition a year. In the end, none of this may come to pass, but there are many interesting things in the market today that make sense for us.”