How ChargeAfter CEO Meidad Sharon grew ChargeAfter to $16.7M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is madod he's a ceo and founder of the award-winning retail finance sas network platform charge after the first global network to provide a complete solution to point-of-sale financing from multiple lenders over 15 years of experience he has over 15 years of experience scaling global payments and sas businesses with the people and customer first approach madonna are you ready to take us to the top sure sure all right 15 years man you're an og what was the first s company you were working on i actually started in the in the mobile space in the time that mobile was uh developing all the value that services be and and starting to have the internet on moved from there to the payment space and and from the payment space this was a natural development in the bnp and point of sale financing space so just describe for people that are not familiar with buy now pay later maybe they've never heard of like uh you know a firm or these sorts of businesses what is buy now pay later yeah so buy now pay later is basically the ability to split a payment to a purchase to a several payments typically between four to six but there are many other types of binomiator that allows the consumer to split the payments of the purchase to up to three years in many cases and this is a very developed very growing trend where consumers can instead of paying now they can pay later and split their purchase it's a new form of credit i would say so most folks listening guys if you have bought maybe a tesla or a purple mattress you may have saw pay with a firm under the checkout page or something like that this is the space you're playing in so mad will consumers buying that mattress or the tesla ever know about you or are you working behind the scenes with tesla directly or with the mattress provider directly so we are working behind the scenes our platform and network is enabling the merchants to have their solution usually we are allowing the merchants to white label it we are working with lenovo as an example if you go to lenovo website you will see lenovo financing it is powered by charge after and we are allowing them to offer this to their consumers you just saw you said lenovo the computer company right computer gaming pcs exactly yeah so i so i see this actually right now uh lenovo financing if you guys just google it there's basically a big pre-qualification button you're basically enabling lenovo to take this in-house not have to rely on a firm or one of these other tools that do it we enable lenovo to have this in-house in the sense that they are utilizing our platform to connect to multiple players like a firm okay that would enable their consumers to have much better coverage than having only one player the the pain point that charge after is solving is that there are many bnpl lenders out there each one of those lenders is focusing on a specific financial product it can be paid for it can be long-term installments it can be revolving line of credit or even a leasing product but each one is different and each consumer would prefer a different product each lender is also focusing on a specific credit segment it might be prime near prime or subprime which means that they will approve only 30 of the consumers or in other words declines 70 of the consumers and each lender is focusing on specific geography but the merchants from their side they're looking to have a solution that would cover all their consumers and they want to have this flexibility and and the consumer from their side they're looking first to be approved right [Music] the consumer experience of being declined in 70 of the cases is not positive so first they are looking to be approved and second they don't want necessarily to have only one option they want the option that has the best fit for them that they can choose from and by having multiple lenders on charge after platform and network we are enabling the merchants to have full coverage best conversion rates best approval rates and the consumer we're almost bidding on their behalf between the different lenders because a firm is an example they're a great lender really they're a great company but they have a very specific product to a very specific um credit box in ever in in in the us right they don't cover our countries they don't cover um nearby most of prime they don't cover revolving line of credit understood oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and so flesh the marketplace out for me how many merchants like lenovo have installed uh charge after on their website so we have we have with many many merchants thousands of merchants that installed charge after millions of consumers used charge after so far we have an amazing investors visa invested in charge after synchrony bank invested in charge after citibank bbva oh sorry just before we get into your funding history because i want to touch on that just i want to understand the merchant side so when you say thousands you're talking between like a thousand and three thousand lenovos have you installed yeah lenovo lenovo is a client for example okay but my point is it's somewhere between like a thousand and three thousand when you say thousands that's what you mean we are private companies so we're not sharing the exact number of merchants that we have but we have wide distribution of charge after across many um many merchants in many territories understood and then on the flip side of the marketplace how many lenders like a firm are on the platform and does a firm have to opt in or do you automatically add them you don't need a relationship with them no so so each lender that is on the platform has a relationship with charge after we have uh close to 40 lenders already on the platform which will go probably 280 by the end of the year so we have dozens of lenders on the platform yep and then i guess when when we talk about your growth which is going to tie into your funding story here i imagine one of the things you measure is just gmv right how many loans done monthly if is that accurate that's a key metric for you yeah yeah so and so are you talking like last month are we talking tens of millions or hundreds of millions or just maybe a million per month can you give me a range of what your gmv is monthly yeah so again we're we are private company we aren't revealing those types of data and to the public but we we are certainly processing very big volumes in in hundreds of millions uh hundreds of millions per month again we cannot share this type well my dad you just shared the number so i now need to qualify it so my audience doesn't get confused you said hundreds of millions is that lifetime no it's not a lifetime but but let's focus on other stuff because we don't feel comfortable to mention specific numbers on a podcast and we are sorry just to be clear you mentioned the number you said hundreds of millions so i want to now make sure i understand it clearly when you say hundreds of millions over is that all time to date or it's not monthly or you don't want to say it's not it's...