Wisetack

Wisetack was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Bobby Tzekin (CEO), Mykola "Kolya" Klymenko (CTO), and Liz O'Donnell. Tzekin left his job in 2018 to start the company after two decades of fintech product leadership at PayPal, Bain & Company, LendingClub, Mosaic (residential solar lending), and YapStone; Klymenko had been co-founder and CTO of Varo Money (parent of Varo Bank), where he built a 70-person engineering team and helped secure the company's OCC banking charter preapproval. The founders identified a gap in consumer financing: while e-commerce buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) players like Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay were booming online, in-person, big-ticket service purchases (home repairs, auto repair, medical/dental procedures) — a market far larger than e-commerce — remained underserved by modern, transparent financing.

Wisetack's core innovation is embedding point-of-sale financing directly into the vertical SaaS / field-service-management software that service businesses already use (e.g., Housecall Pro, Jobber, Markate), rather than building a standalone merchant-facing product. A contractor or clinic sends a customer a text or invoice link; the consumer sees financing offers (often 0% APR promotional plans up to 24 months, or longer terms up to 120 months / amounts up to $65,000) within about a minute, with instant approval and no impact on credit from checking eligibility. Wisetack itself does not lend directly — loans are originated and funded by bank lending partners, including U.S. Bank, Citizens Pay, Hatch Bank, Group 1001 (insurance-backed committed capital), and, as of an April 2026 partnership, LendingClub (which underwrites and originates home-improvement loans through Wisetack).

Greylock Partners led Wisetack's $4M Seed round in January 2019 and its $15M Series A in August 2019 (both alongside Bain Capital Ventures), giving the company $19M raised by early 2021. In September 2021, Wisetack announced a $45M Series B led by New York-based Insight Partners, with existing investors Greylock and Bain Capital Ventures also participating, bringing total funding to $64M since founding; Insight Principal Rebecca Liu-Doyle called the platform "a true win-win-win for partners, merchants, and consumers." The company continued raising capital in subsequent years (third-party trackers such as Tracxn and Startup Intros estimate total funding of roughly $105-108M across five equity rounds as of 2025-2026, with investors including Insight Partners, Greylock, Bain Capital Ventures, and Quadrille Capital), alongside separate debt/warehouse credit facility relationships with bank partners that are sometimes reported by data aggregators as additional "corporate rounds."

Business model

B2B2C embedded finance: Wisetack integrates via API into the software platforms (vertical SaaS / field-service-management tools) that service businesses already use, letting those merchants offer point-of-sale consumer financing. Actual loans are originated/funded by Wisetack's bank lending partners (e.g., U.S. Bank, Group 1001, Citizens Pay, Hatch Bank, LendingClub), not by Wisetack directly, which acts as the technology/servicing layer and manages capital markets relationships.

Merchant-paid processing/platform fees on financed transactions, plus (for interest-bearing plans) consumer interest income shared with lending partners; merchants can also subsidize 0% APR promotional plans.