Eyal Lifshitz

Co-Founder and CEO Bluevine

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Eyal Lifshitz co-founded Bluevine in 2013 to fix something he had watched from inside a family rather than from a spreadsheet. He describes himself as a third-generation small-business person - his grandfather ran a lighting and electrical supply store in Israel, his father a physical therapy clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side - and the recurring problem in both was not demand but cash flow, money owed and not yet paid while rent and wages came due. Banks handled that badly, because underwriting a $50,000 line of credit costs roughly what underwriting a $5m one does and earns far less. Bluevine’s answer was to automate the assessment, using machine learning to price risk fast enough to make small-business credit economic. The company began with online invoice factoring, moved into lines of credit and term loans, and then into banking proper, with FDIC-insured business checking and a high-yield account. It reached national visibility in 2020 as one of the largest lenders by application volume under the Paycheck Protection Program. Lifshitz came to it from the other side of the table, as a principal at Greylock’s Israel and Europe fund, and took a substantial pay cut to build it.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Bluevine in 2013 with Nir Klar, who became CTO, and has led it as CEO since, initially from Palo Alto.
• Built the original product around machine-learning credit assessment for small businesses, starting with invoice factoring and expanding into lines of credit and term loans.
• Became one of the top lenders by application volume under the Paycheck Protection Program across 2020 and 2021, when small-business emergency credit was a national priority; a 2022 congressional report noted the company reduced PPP fraud through new software, manual reviews and continuous review.
• Moved the company into banking, offering FDIC-insured business checking with coverage extended to $3M in 2023 and launching a high-yield checking product in November 2023.
• Added invoicing and payment links through a partnership with Stripe in May 2025.
• Raised more than $240M in equity by 2019, including a $102.5M round whose investors included Citigroup and Microsoft.
• Grew the company past 500 employees by 2024 and moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Redwood City in 2019 and then to Jersey City, New Jersey, in 2023.
• Was involved in investing more than $100M in startups as a principal at Greylock IL, Greylock Partners’ dedicated fund for Israel and Europe, and earlier worked as a McKinsey consultant and a Texas Instruments engineer.

Professional Journey

Lifshitz trained as an electrical engineer and began his career at Texas Instruments before moving into management consulting at McKinsey & Company, a route that took him from building things to analysing businesses. He then joined Greylock IL, Greylock Partners’ dedicated fund for Israel and Europe, as a principal, where he was involved in deploying more than $100M into startups. That is an unusually good vantage point from which to notice an unbuilt company, and it is where the Bluevine idea took shape.

What he noticed was a structural gap rather than a market niche. Small businesses are the majority of employers and a minority of bank lending attention, because the fixed cost of underwriting does not scale down. His own family had lived on the wrong side of that arithmetic. The bet behind Bluevine was that the underwriting cost could be driven down with data and machine learning to the point where lending small amounts, quickly, became a viable business. Leaving venture capital to test it meant a large personal pay cut, which he has spoken about directly.

He founded the company in 2013 with Nir Klar, who took the CTO role, and started in Palo Alto. The first product was invoice factoring delivered online - advancing money against unpaid invoices, a very old financial product with a reputation for opacity, rebuilt as software with transparent pricing and fast decisions. From there the company layered on lines of credit and term lending, broadening from a single cash-flow instrument into general small-business credit.

The Paycheck Protection Program in 2020 was the company’s stress test and its breakout. When the US government routed emergency small-business lending through private lenders, the institutions best able to process enormous application volumes quickly were the automated ones, and Bluevine became one of the top lenders by application volume across 2020 and 2021. The programme also attracted very large-scale fraud industry-wide; a 2022 congressional report specifically noted that Bluevine had reduced PPP fraud by deploying new software alongside manual and continuous review, which is a better outcome than several of its peers achieved.

Since then the strategy has been to stop being only a lender. Bluevine added FDIC-insured business checking, raised deposit coverage to $3M in 2023, launched a high-yield checking account that November, and in May 2025 added invoicing and payment links through a Stripe partnership - the shape of a small-business banking platform rather than a credit product. The company passed 500 employees by 2024 and relocated its headquarters from California to Jersey City in 2023, having moved from Palo Alto to Redwood City in 2019. Lifshitz remains co-founder and chief executive.

Education

University of Chicago

MBA with high honors, Carlton Fellow

Tel Aviv University

BSc, Electrical engineering

The MBA is well attested across his own interview material. The undergraduate entry appears only in commercial aggregator records and has no institutional confirmation.