MELIO

Melio started in 2018 with three Israeli founders. Matan Bar, Ilan Atias, and Ziv Paz.

Matan Bar had spent years in payments, including time at PayPal. They noticed something crazy about American small business.

Most of them still paid their suppliers with paper checks in the mail. Big banks had modern tools.

The corner bakery and the local plumber did not. Melio set out to give tiny businesses the same easy payments the giants already had.

They built it in New York with an engineering team in Tel Aviv.

Melio does one thing well. It lets a small business pay its bills online.

Say you run a coffee shop and owe your bean supplier $2,000. With Melio you pay by bank transfer or credit card from your phone.

The supplier can still receive it as a paper check if that is all they accept. Basic bank transfers were free.

Melio made money on card payments and faster-payment fees. Pay with a card and Melio takes a small cut.

That is the core of it.

The main product is Melio's bill pay platform for small businesses. You add a bill, choose how to pay, and the vendor gets paid however they prefer.

There are accounts payable tools for money going out and accounts receivable tools for money coming in. Melio also built white-label payments that other companies plug into their own apps.

That embedded product is how it reached partners like Capital One. One simple job, done for both the payer and the person getting paid.

Melio grew by hiding inside other software. Instead of only chasing customers directly, it powered payments for bigger platforms.

A deal with Capital One and integrations with accounting tools put Melio in front of millions of small businesses. When COVID hit in 2020, small firms rushed to pay bills online instead of by mail.

Melio's volume jumped. The company said monthly payment volume grew 5,000% over eighteen months.

It rode the shift from paper to digital at exactly the right time.

Melio's model had a soft spot. A lot of its payments were free bank transfers, which make little money.

The real revenue came from card payments and fees. That meant Melio needed enormous volume to pay off.

It also leaned heavily on partnerships. Lose a big partner and a chunk of business goes with it.

B2B payments got crowded with rivals like Bill.com too. The $4 billion valuation from 2021 set a high bar.

Selling to Xero in 2025 for $2.5 billion was a strong outcome, but it landed below that peak.

Melio raised roughly $500 million from top-tier backers. Early money came from Israeli firm Aleph and from Bessemer Venture Partners.

The huge 2021 Series D was co-led by Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner's firm, and General Catalyst. Tiger Global, Accel, and Coatue piled in too.

That round valued Melio at $4 billion. In 2025 they all cashed out when Xero, the New Zealand accounting software giant, bought Melio for $2.5 billion up front.