Lendpilot’s Mike Assim Wants Business Financing to Move Beyond the Sales Call
Ask a small business owner what happened after applying for working capital online, and the story is usually the same: one application, then a week of calls from people they never contacted, all pitching the same file.
That is the problem Mike Assim set out to fix. Assim, managing partner of Lendpilot, has worked on both sides of the transaction since 2011, and the business financing marketplace is built on a simple bet: the middle of the process, from intake to matching to the offer itself, should be software, not a sales floor.
A system, not a salesperson
"A brokerage is a person shopping your file. A marketplace is a system," Assim said.
At Lendpilot, a merchant's application goes through one review and is matched against a network of lenders, each with its own credit box, the range of deals it will approve. Offers come back in the same format every time: funding amount, product, term, payment schedule, payment amount, and total payback. The lending partner makes the final credit decision, and Lendpilot says so on its site, which lists funding from $2,500 to $1 million across products including revenue based financing, business lines of credit, and term loans.
Merchants get a number without sitting through five pitches on the same shopped file. Funders get consistent files that fit their box instead of "a shotgun blast of submissions." According to Assim, about a dozen referral partners now submit their deals through the platform.
Both sides of the table
"In 2011 I joined World Business Lenders as its first employee and watched the company grow to 140 people," Assim said. The New York lender was founded that year. Next came senior credit risk at Capify, business development at In Advance Capital, and an independent brokerage in 2018. Assim stepped away in 2021 for international ventures, returned in 2024, and launched Lendpilot in 2025.
Assim is also upfront about a second role: head of partnerships at Cashera, a funder offering fast advances to gig workers, contractors and micro-businesses through automated underwriting. Gig workers and 1099 earners are Cashera's market, not Lendpilot's. Cashera funds those small advances directly, Assim said, while Lendpilot's focus has shifted to larger commercial transactions placed with outside lenders, with collateral-backed deals available as well. "Separate companies and products, and partners always know exactly which one they're working with."
Retention is the scoreboard
Some Lendpilot clients have been funded many times over, which is rare in an industry known for churn. Assim calls that churn "mostly self-inflicted."
A merchant gets oversold, the payment strains the business, and the client either disappears or stacks out of the book. The fix is unglamorous: size the first deal correctly, show the full cost upfront, and make the renewal easier than the original application.
"Repeat business is the scoreboard for whether the first deal was honest," Assim said.
That includes knowing when to move a client up. Assim watches payment performance on the current facility, deposit consistency, time in business, and whether the credit profile has recovered enough to qualify for cheaper money. When it has, the client moves to a line of credit or term loan, even when a quick renewal would pay more today. "Cash flow financing is a bridge, not a lifestyle."
Stacking and the doctored bank statement
Stacking is where that discipline gets tested. Lendpilot asks merchants upfront about open positions, the advances they are still repaying, and the bank statements show them anyway. "A merchant paying three dailies cannot hide it from anyone who reads the statements," Assim said. The first move on a file carrying positions is a lender who can pay them off. When consolidation is off the table, any new offer is sized against what is already on the books so the business does not end up overleveraged.
Fraud is the other front-door problem. According to Assim, AI-edited bank statements are now good enough that eyeballing a PDF is no longer a control, and attempts are clearly up. Lendpilot built its own OCR that reads statement PDFs and checks the metadata behind them. "It's not 100%, but it's close," Assim said. Files that show signs of manipulation never reach the lending network.
"The fraudsters are industrializing. The defense has to industrialize too."
Regulation, and where the data goes
Assim treats state disclosure rules as constant work to track and build into how offers are presented, not something to fight. The bigger problem, in Assim's view, is how fast a merchant's file travels: apply once, and it can be shared across hundreds of companies almost immediately, undercutting the marketplaces and lead generators that paid to acquire that merchant.
Beyond existing efforts from vendors or trade associations, Assim is working on a better way to secure and share data between marketplaces and lead generators.
Embedded finance as an opening
Assim sees lending offers inside merchant software as distribution moving to where the merchant already works, with the marketplace as the engine behind it. Someone still has to hold the lender relationships, match the file and present a compliant offer. What embedded finance threatens, Assim said, is cold outreach and the call floor model.
"The platforms own the moment of need. The marketplace owns the matching."
In three years, Assim wants Lendpilot embedded across the financial tools merchants already use: apply once, see the terms and options, decide.
Not 15 phone calls.
Getting there takes three things. The automation has to keep compounding, because the economics are decided in minutes per file. The partner network has to keep growing, because distribution is the moat. And Lendpilot has to stay ahead of fraud "because trust is the only thing a marketplace actually sells."
For an industry still built largely on outbound calls, that is a direct challenge to the model.
You can reach LendPilot's Mike Assim here: