These firms don’t live in the same cash flow universe as software companies. Orders take weeks to fulfill, invoices sit 60 to 90 days (or longer) before they’re paid, and one enterprise buyer’s decision to stretch terms can ripple through an entire regional supply chain.
“We spent a lot of time in the real economy talking to customers,” Daylit co-founder and CEO Jared Shulman said during a discussion with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “The thing that always comes up is working capital and capital planning. It’s very anxiety-inducing. It’s very stressful.”
“And when you get the capital, it’s expensive capital,” Webster said.
Most lenders to SMBs wrestle with a particular dilemma. If they say yes with a limit that’s too conservative, they risk the customer stacking with another costlier product. Or if they say yes with a higher limit, they take on unintended risk.
“There’s a misconception that SMBs don’t have access to capital,” Shulman said. “Anytime I pick up the phone, I could get a loan. And so, I think that’s a misconception… But what we’ve seen is that businesses today don’t have access to good or healthy forms of capital.”
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Daylit is working to position itself as a “healthy” option in the SMB financing space and announced this month that it raised $110 million to scale its solution, Shulman said.
“We’re not focused on a merchant cash advance,” he said. “Where we really come into play is with strategic working capital… financing that helps you either speed up the collection from your customer or delay a payment to your vendor.”
“We’re seeing a lot of pressure from our customers’ enterprise clients to delay terms,” he added. “It’s not uncommon for our customers to offer 60 or 90 days. And we’re seeing a lot of pressure to extend those 60 days to 90 days, or 90 days to 120.”
Two Customer Archetypes, One Underwriting Lens
Compared to traditional SMB lending, Daylit’s approach is focused less on selling a lump-sum loan and more on reshaping the timing of its customers’ cash flow.
SMB borrowers typically cluster into two groups: those who need capital right now, and those who want an offer they can slot into a broader plan, Shulman said. The split can often hinge on one yes-or-no question: Are firms planning their working capital cycle?
If not, urgency reigns. If so, deliberation does.
“The best time to apply for a loan is when you don’t need it… that’s when you’re going to have the best rates,” Shulman said, adding that what’s distinctive in Daylit’s approach is the data it leans on to underwrite those two groups.
“The more that we can understand not just how much money is coming in, but where it’s coming from, how often it’s coming from the same sources, and how diversified those sources are, is a great determinant for the risk of the business,” he said. “The best way for us to do that is to connect to their ERP or their accounting system.”
That linkage, matching invoices to cash receipts and tracking the behavior of the buyers, lets Daylit model revenue, forecast collections and size limits more precisely. It also lets the company adjust pricing based on observable counterparty integrity.
Accounts receivable is “the heartbeat of the business,” Webster said. “Every time you provide a service or ship a good, you’re extending credit until you get paid.”
Why now? Enterprise budgets look forward, while macro data often looks backward.
“Even though the consumer’s been resilient, it can still take a lot of time for that to flow through the economy,” Shulman said. Large buyers “expect some weakness in the consumer,” and the “first place” to shore up working capital is “delaying payments to their vendors.”
That can turn “money that’s on its way to the bank” into an existential gap for a contractor or regional manufacturer, Webster said.
Building a Future Atop Agentic AI Receivables
The cutting edge of working capital underwriting is becoming increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, particularly agentic AI systems that can gather, reason over and act on unstructured data. Because these models can map invoices to deposits and spot deviations, they can surface opportunities and risks along the buyer chain in near-real time.
The next step is productizing that capability for customers as a “receivables intelligence” layer, Shulman said. The idea is to treat every extension of trade credit like a lender would by scoring the buyer, monitoring aging and slippage, and standardizing escalation.
SMB controllers and AR clerks are creatures of habit. Shulman said he bets that AI-assisted workflows will feel less like disruption and more like oxygen. If the tools can standardize dunning, prioritize outreach and flag customer credit changes before they bite, adoption should follow.
“As a B2B business, giving net terms, well, to some extent you’re a lender,” Shulman said. “You have to make a credit decision. You have to collect.”
Daylit’s own sweet spot is established operators, or firms with $2 million to $50 million in annual revenue (and some up to $250 million), typically in business 5 to 25 years.
“We’re not providing startup capital,” Shulman said. “Accounts receivable finance is not a great way to finance the business in the beginning, but when you start to get a little bit of a critical mass and think, ‘Now we want to optimize,’ that’s where our product [is] really competitive.”
“We’re never going to win on the size of the line,” he added. “We want to offer the healthy one, and sometimes that means a much better rate, but it’s not going to be the exact amount that you want right now. And over time, you can grow into it.”
The underwriting and “receivables intelligence” story hinges on stitching invoices to cash with high fidelity. Breadth across QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage and vertical ERPs, and the ability to parse their idiosyncrasies, will determine how predictive AI models really are.
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PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster is one of the world’s leading experts in payments innovation and the digital economy, advising multinational companies and sitting on boards of emerging AI, HealthTech and real-time payments firms. In 2009, she founded PYMNTS.com, a top media platform covering innovation in payments, commerce and the digital economy. Webster is also the author of the NEXT newsletter and a co-founder of Market Platform Dynamics, specializing in driving and monetizing innovation across industries.
Jared Shulman is the co-founder and CEO of Daylit, an all-in-one working capital platform for real economy operators.
