BlueVine
BlueVine (formally BlueVine Capital), is a Redwood City, California–based fintech company that provides online business banking and financing to small and medium-sized businesses. History. BlueVine was founded in 2013 by CEO Eyal Lifshitz, and fellow entrepreneurs Nir Klar and Moti Shatner. Lifshitz was a venture capitalist who previously worked at Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm Greylock Partners. The idea for the business came to him after seeing his father's difficulty with cash flow while running a small business. Lifshitz realized the complicated process could be simplified as an online service. In January 2016, the  company announced a $40 million funding round. That same month, the company started offering business loans. In April, the company announced a partnership with New York bank Citigroup and an undisclosed investment with the bank's Citi Ventures strategic investing arm. In May 2018, the company announced it had been awarded a $200 million line of credit from Credit Suisse Group, which it would use to expand its business services and increase the credit limit it offered its customers. In June, the company raised $60 million in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from  existing investors. In November 2019, the company raised $102.5 million in Series F financing, led by venture capital firm ION Crossover Partners, along with existing investors. In December 2019, the company announced plans to build an operations center in Utah to support its expansion into business banking services including checking and line of credit services. At the time, the company announced the customer service center would hire almost 1,500 new employees. In 2020, BlueVine facilitated more than 155,000 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to small businesses, totaling more than $4.5 billion. By March 2021, during the second wave  of Covid, the company had already facilitated more than $2 billion in PPP loans, which included setting up dedicated landing pages to help ride share company Lyft's independent drivers apply for funding. It was soon reported that Congress was investigating whether some of the PPP loans facilitated by BlueVine were fraudulent. In October, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that fintech companies such as Bluevine and its rivals handled 75% of the approved PPP loans that were connected to fraud by the Department of Justice, but also noted there was no evidence that lenders broke the rules or were accused of  any wrongdoing. Services. BlueVine offers online business banking and financing services through three products: term loans, lines of credit, and invoice factoring. BlueVine’s factoring loans are an alternative to traditional daily cash advances. Financing rates are based on the borrower's financial metrics. Banking customers have access to lines of credit and checking services. Operations. BlueVine is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and as of December 2019 has an operations center under development in Utah. The company also has a development office in Ramat Gan, Israel. BlueVine uses Amazon Web Services machine learning to automate the loan process by  extracting text and data from documents.