PhD to $100M Revenue: Rebuilding SMB Lending with AI | Sahill Poddar, Co-founder and CEO of Parafin

The Peel with Turner Novak

Turner Novak

Technology

4.6 • 11 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sahill Poddar is the Co-founder and CEO of Parafin, helping marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers offer financial services their merchants.

Sahill and his team have quietly built Parafin to nearly a $100m GAAP revenue run rate in only four years, and they've done it in an industry that's become a Silicon Valley graveyard: SMB lending.

Sahill talks about how they partnered with other marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers to offer financial services to SMBs at scale, landing DoorDash as their first customer before building the product, and advice for technical teams learning enterprise sales.

Sahill's a fascinating founder, as he started his career getting a PhD discovering the Higgs boson particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. We talk about physics, he explains how the Large Hadron Collider works, why physics is just real world machine learning, and all the lessons he learned on the growth teams at Facebook and Robinhood (including the way Robinhood acquired most of its userbase!)

A thank you to Hans Tung at Notable Capital, Nick Shalek at Ribbit, and Mahdi Raza at Pathlight for their help brainstorming topics for the conversation.

Thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. It's the corporate card and expense management platform used by over 40,000 companies, like Shopify, CBRE and Stripe. Time is money. Save both with Ramp. Get your $250 here.

Timestamps:

(4:06) Lending to SMBs inside marketplaces and platforms

(9:39) Why SMB lending is so hard

(12:50) Three ways AI is changing Fintech

(16:47) Silicon Valley’s graveyard of SMB lenders

(22:44) Getting a PhD in Particle Physics

(26:15) How CERN's Large Hadron Collider works

(31:49) Discovering new dimensions

(34:10) Building billion user data sets at Facebook

(39:53) Working with other physicists at Robinhood

(50:29) Growth lessons from FB + Robinhood

(1:00:57) Starting Parafin, embedded, horizontal SMB lending

(1:06:09) Why credit is the biggest problem for SMBs

(1:10:53) Raising a Seed from Ribbit pre-product

(1:13:25) Landing DoorDash as the first customer

(1:16:51) Mastering B2B sales as a technical founder

(1:22:58) Lessons from Vlad at Robinhood

Referenced

Parafin:

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You can be a profitable seller on Etsy or Amazon and selling profitably for several years,
0:04.8	but you may not pass the bid that threshold for the bank, or you may not have the right FICO
0:07.8	number for the bank.
0:09.3	Meanwhile, if you kind of look at the business performance, there's many reasons to be able
0:14.3	to extend credit to them.
0:15.6	And so we kind of break that mold and solve that by relying on data and machine learning
0:20.5	and AI modeling in order
0:21.9	to extend credit. Banks do play in the space, but they have archaic means and archaic methods to do so,
0:27.0	and we're here to kind of reinvent that. Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder
0:31.7	of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Sahel Padar, co-founder and CEO Perip. The emergence and the
0:37.3	scaling of marketplaces, vertical SaaS, final sale solution,
0:41.3	meant that we could now tap into data sources that would allow us to build a product and sell it.
0:48.3	Sawhill is a unique founder, getting his PhD discovering the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
0:54.6	A lot of the future dreams of CERN were in some ways shattered, which led to folks like myself
1:01.4	branching out of physics.
1:03.2	We talked about how physics is just real-world machine learning and lessons from growing Facebook
1:07.6	and Robin Hood. That particular experiment blew every other experiment out of the water and we just started
1:13.3	pouring the fuel on the fire. A big amount of the user base was captured using this technique.
1:19.1	Starting paraffin, which is nearing on $100 million in Gap revenue run rate four years later
1:23.5	and how they've avoided Silicon Valley's graveyard of SMB lenders.
1:27.5	Businesses that click on ads to borrow money are probably not the ones you want to lend money
1:32.4	to anyways. How they leverage marketplaces in vertical SaaS platforms to reach SMBs at scale.
	...

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