Jared Shulman and the money that was already there

Jared Shulman and Jerry Shu began with an administrative error. At a networking event in 2015, each received the other’s name tag. Finding the person who belonged to the label produced a conversation; the conversation became a friendship; in 2020, the two founded Lendica. There are more elaborate ways to recruit a co-founder. Few come with a sticker.

Today Shulman runs Daylit, the company Lendica became, and his subject is another mismatch: the distance between money a business has earned and money it can actually spend. A customer has received the goods. An invoice exists. The bank account has yet to enjoy the occasion. Somewhere between those facts sits a finance team trying to work out what happens next.

Shulman arrived at that problem through lending. Customers wanted capital, certainly. But they also wanted their own customers to settle up. Following that complaint took him from financing the wait to building software that could help explain and shorten it. The change makes his career read differently: a succession of financial systems, each bringing him closer to the people using them.

A useful thing, then a larger one

Shulman graduated from Babson College in 2012, having studied business management and entrepreneurship. He also studied at Stellenbosch University in 2011. His career included an assistant portfolio manager position at EntrepreneurShares, the founding of Pendleton in 2016, and work at ILA Capital from 2018. Pendleton’s work concerned data-driven risk management and automation; at ILA, the problems included trading, reporting and risk.

Those nouns can sound remote from a contractor waiting for payment. The underlying work is less remote: assemble scattered information, decide what it means and give someone a reliable basis for action. A report has to connect to a decision. A system has to survive the arrival of tomorrow’s data.

In his own account of the progression, Shulman describes a chart-analysis tool for one trader leading to a risk system for a fund, then to infrastructure for a hedge fund preparing to launch. Each job created the opportunity for the next. His explanation gives the career a practical rhythm, with completed work doing some of the work usually assigned to ambition.

“Every system I ever built opened the door to a bigger one.”

Jared Shulman

That is a useful way to read his eventual company. Before there was a platform to sell, there were financial processes to understand. The experience accumulated one system at a time.

The loan button moves closer

Lendica’s initial proposition was embedded finance: make financing available inside software a business already uses. The business owner would encounter the option while handling an actual purchase or operating task. In Babson’s alumni business directory, Shulman described the company’s inspiration as helping small businesses obtain faster, more affordable finance.

That positioning put distribution near the work. In October 2022, an Altametrics partnership offered payment plans for point-of-sale equipment. The use case was tangible: restaurant franchisees could spread an equipment purchase across several months. Shulman described an installation completed in two weeks with input from the partner and Cici’s. Software, equipment and financing met at the same counter.

By February 2023, Lendica was discussing Shopify and Salesforce integrations. Its tools included FundNow, PayLater and DrawDown. Behind the buttons sat a larger information problem: how to assemble a usable picture of a small business from its financial records. An application is only as helpful as the evidence available to evaluate it.

For Shulman, the system-building continued. The company had to make information travel between businesses, software providers and financing decisions. Convenience at the front of the process depended on considerable organization behind it. A button is a pleasingly small object for the amount of work expected of it.

When the borrower points elsewhere

Then customers redirected the conversation. Shulman has described a distributor managing hundreds of accounts without a useful way to prioritize them. The company could borrow money, but its more persistent difficulty lay with customers who were slow to pay. Another loan could help cover the interval. It could also leave the underlying collection work waiting exactly where it had been.

Daylit’s prototype pulled receivables data together with information from customer emails. A balance ninety days overdue acquired a history: perhaps a payment promise had passed, or the conversation had gone quiet. Shulman says other customers wanted the prototype too. The lender had found a second use for its attention to payment behavior.

The appeal is easy to understand without imagining a machine that solves every dispute. An aging report sorts balances by time. A collector still has to determine what to do about them. Connecting the correspondence to the account can make the next action more specific. Someone has to know whether another reminder will help or whether a different conversation is overdue.

Reading beneath the balance

Shulman’s September 2024 explanation of Lens, the company’s credit-policy approach, offers a bridge between the two businesses. He argued for looking beyond summary financial statements and credit scores to more granular information. Customer concentration, payment patterns and sales consistency could provide a more detailed picture of the borrower.

That emphasis carries into receivables. A total tells a finance leader how much is outstanding. The pattern behind it helps frame the next question. Is the same customer repeatedly late? Is a delay becoming longer? Does the correspondence suggest an administrative obstacle? Better organization of the evidence gives the person responsible more to work with.

In a September 2025 interview with Karen Webster, Shulman discussed buyers pressing suppliers for longer terms, including extensions from sixty to ninety days and ninety to 120. He described a focus on established businesses that make, move and install things. For those businesses, the gap has operating consequences. A supplier does not become more patient simply because its customer has a larger procurement department.

The product challenge is therefore partly about time: making payment expectations visible early enough for someone to respond. Financing can bridge an interval; collections can help address its cause. Keeping both in view gives Shulman a reason to care about the conversation attached to the invoice.

A question worth financing

In September 2025, Daylit announced $110 million in combined equity and debt financing. Companyon Ventures led the round, with participation including NextView Ventures and SixThirty Ventures; Viola Credit provided a credit facility. The announcement accompanied the change from Lendica to Daylit and plans to expand accounts receivable agents alongside the financing products.

Shulman framed the problem in a question finance teams would recognize: “What’s going on with that account?” It is short enough to fit in a passing conversation and broad enough to occupy an afternoon. The answer might be divided between an accounting export, an inbox and somebody’s memory. Bringing those pieces together is work before any collection work begins.

His December 2025 discussion of late payments described six months of conversations with more than one hundred CFOs. The recurring obstacles included disputed amounts, shipment questions, credit research and payment-plan discussions. A late invoice could carry a queue of smaller jobs. Sending another reminder leaves that queue intact if the unanswered question is still blocking payment.

The classroom gets another address

Shulman also teaches. He serves as a guest lecturer at Babson, covering fintech for undergraduate and MBA students. In March 2026, a conversation with Bob Shultz on Credit on the Go addressed practical uses of AI in credit and collections, including the continuing role of human judgment in negotiation and credit decisions.

The teaching became part of Daylit’s public product activity in April 2026, when it announced a free AI Skills program. The proposed exercises included invoice validation, bank-to-invoice matching and credit reports. The audience was the people responsible for finance operations, with an invitation to build workflows themselves.

The choice of exercises says something about the ambition. These are tasks that absorb a working day in pieces. An improvement has to be useful at the desk where the bank transaction needs matching, with the information that team actually has. Teaching the workflow also gives its user a chance to inspect it.

Room for the unexpected

There is a less abstract version of building a company in Shulman’s early-office history. He and Shu rented a law-firm conference room before moving into coworking space. Heating stopped after office hours; winter work required parkas. Later, walks near their Boston office brought them across student musicians whom they invited to play at an anniversary party.

Those details keep the story at a human scale. A company requires somewhere to sit, people willing to work together and a succession of decisions that become obvious only afterward. The name tags are funny because the founders could have handed them back and carried on.

The AI Survival Guide introduction now pairs Shulman and Shu with Boston landmarks, teaching finance skills through a city they know. His work keeps returning to the same practical test: can this help someone handle what is in front of them? An invoice, a risk system, a lesson. The next thing to build begins with paying attention.