Lilac Bar David and the second job nobody applied for

Independence comes with an administrative joke. You become your own boss, then discover how many people you must impersonate: the bookkeeper, the person chasing invoices, the person putting money aside for taxes. The title is yours. So is the inbox. Lilac Bar David built Lili around this awkward promotion. Her original customer was the freelancer whose working life crossed a boundary that banking products tended to keep tidy: an individual earning money through a business, often with one pair of hands doing everything.

Bar David had already spent years inside banking and payments before she took on that customer. She had helped build Pepper, a mobile banking business in Israel, and worked in business development at Leumi Card. By the time she and Liran Zelkha turned their attention to America, they knew the machinery. Their question was where to put it to work. Freelancers offered a specific answer: people who needed to get paid, understand their spending and prepare for taxes without assembling a finance department.

That choice gives her career an interesting shape. An executive learns how a bank works, helps create a different banking experience, then starts again around a different kind of customer. The second venture asks more of the account itself. Money arriving and leaving should help explain the business that produced it. A checking balance tells you what is there today; the owner also wants to know what belongs to tomorrow. Between those two questions lies much of Lili's story.

Before New York, there was Pepper

Born in Israel, Bar David recalls childhood Saturdays on Tel Aviv's beaches, surrounded by cousins, ice cream and games of Monopoly and UNO. Her interest in technology came later, during army service. The recollection is refreshingly ordinary for someone in finance: plenty of family, plenty of sunshine, and a board game in which property ownership can ruin a perfectly pleasant afternoon. It would be too neat to claim Monopoly foretold her career. The useful detail is her pleasure in learning something unfamiliar.

She studied economics and accounting at Tel Aviv University, followed by an MBA in management information systems. That pairing puts financial records and technical systems on the same educational page. Her subsequent work at Leumi Card included strategic partnerships and a program for early-stage fintech companies. She came to entrepreneurship with experience in the institutions and relationships that a new financial product needs to navigate.

Pepper, which she began building in 2015, focused on millennials and younger adults. Zelkha worked alongside her as its research-and-development leader. The ambition was to make banking fit the mobile habits of its customers. Bar David later described growing Pepper's team to 250 people. That experience supplied an operating education: moving from a proposed product to an organization large enough to deliver it.

Israel also put a limit on the size of the opportunity. Bar David wanted to work in a larger market. America offered both scale and a customer group with financial needs that were easy to describe but awkwardly served. Zelkha brought another perspective: he had spent more than a decade freelancing. The partnership joined banking experience with firsthand knowledge of earning an independent living. Their next product would need to understand both.

A name made for two

Even the name took some work. Bar David and Zelkha knew what they wanted the company to do before they knew what to call it. After repeated attempts, they combined their initials into Lili. People often assume it is named after her; she has said the assumption eventually made it her nickname. A flower association pleased her too. It is an unusually compact account of a co-founder relationship: two people inside four letters, with room left over for a little personality.

Lili was established in 2018 and developed through 2019; Bar David dates the U.S. product launch to January 2020. Its early proposition combined an account with expense tracking and tools for setting money aside for taxes. A freelancer could distinguish personal spending from work spending within the mobile experience. The product began with the things an owner does repeatedly, rather than with an impressive menu requiring another evening to understand.

Her approach also reached into the brand. Bar David wanted women freelancers to feel welcome in a financial industry whose names and colors could feel imposing. “We wanted something more smooth,” she said. The wording is modest, but the intention is specific: make the first encounter less forbidding. By 2021, she reported that women opened 60 percent of Lili accounts. That figure belongs to that moment in the company's history, and helps explain why the welcome mattered.

The early design used a familiar phone gesture to categorize purchases: swipe one way for personal, the other for work. A small interaction could feed an expense report. There is a pleasing economy to that idea. People already knew the gesture; the unfamiliar part was the financial task. Design could shorten the distance between the two. Nobody goes freelance because they dream of spending a memorable evening labeling transactions.

“The first thing I ask is, ‘What keeps you awake at night?’”Lilac Bar David, on hiring

The account becomes the starting point

Lili's launch soon met a sharp change in American working life. Bar David has recalled initial uncertainty, followed by growing demand as more people began independent work and turned to digital financial services. The company also put practical information inside the app and into newsletters and guides. A person learning to run a business needed explanations alongside the tools. The account could be a place to learn what to do next.

In May 2021, Lili raised a $55 million Series B led by Group 11. Total funding reached $80 million. The company had reached 200,000 customers by that point. Later milestones show the venture becoming a more substantial business: Deloitte's 2024 Technology Fast 500 ranked Lili at number 120, with 980 percent revenue growth over the ranking's measurement period. These are dated milestones, rather than a claim about today's headcount or customer total.

For Bar David, the product's logic begins with the transactions. In a 2023 explanation of Lili's automation, she described using account activity to categorize spending and connect incoming payments to invoices. A transaction already contains information that bookkeeping needs. Moving it between separate tools asks the owner to act as a courier. Connecting those jobs creates a chance to spare the owner another round of copying, checking and matching.

Trust enters the same discussion. She has treated education as part of the relationship with customers, offering guides and online sessions about managing a business. In financial services, understandable instructions carry weight. A new feature can be useful and still feel mysterious; an owner needs to know what it is doing with the records of their working life. Bar David's emphasis on explanation makes sense beside her emphasis on automation. Both address the burden of doing unfamiliar work alone.

Advice, without another open tab

By 2024, Bar David was writing about Accountant AI, Lili's tool for answering business-finance questions using the customer's financial context. In a company survey she cited, nearly 80 percent of owners handled their own accounting and finances. She framed the opportunity around access: smaller businesses often cannot afford the same continuous financial support that larger organizations can buy. The person watching cash flow still has questions, even when there is no accountant on retainer.

The ambition fits the original customer. Moving money and making sense of money are related tasks, yet software often makes them feel like separate occupations. Bar David's product argument is that context can travel with the question. The challenge for an owner might be a category, a report or the implications of a payment. An answer attached to actual business activity is potentially more useful than starting each time with an empty search box.

Her own experience as a small-business owner has also shaped Lili's development. By August 2024, the company had grown from its founding pair to nearly 100 full-time employees. The distance between those two stages is considerable. A founder can remember the frustrations of doing everything personally while running an organization whose staff now divide those jobs among themselves. Keeping that first experience close gives product decisions a practical reference point.

Two continents, a shared problem

In May 2025, Bar David spoke with Efficio founder Dan Raveh about selling into the United States while operating across Israel and America. Her advice concerned distribution: look for channels that reach multiple banks, and consider where a product complements an existing service. It was a conversation about how customers are reached, as much as what gets built. Integration costs and a buyer's existing relationships can shape the route to a sale.

That same habit of joining services appears in Lili's collaboration with Dun & Bradstreet. BusinessBuild brought business-credit monitoring and a secured card into the platform in 2025. The company then moved further toward growing businesses with employees in January 2026. In June, it announced embedded credit solutions with Fundbox. The customer was expanding, and so was the set of tasks attached to running the account.

On June 24, 2026, Lili announced a connection between compatible AI assistants and client-authorized banking data for accountants. The idea was to help professionals review multiple clients' balances and transactions without repeatedly moving between portals. A venture that began by helping the solo owner was now also addressing the professionals around that owner. It is a continuation of Bar David's interest in reducing the work required to reach useful financial information.

A little room for the sea

Away from banking, Bar David has three children and likes swimming and paddle boarding. She says paddle boarding helps her clear her head. The sea remains a thread from her childhood account of Tel Aviv Saturdays to her adult interests. She is also enthusiastic about Thai food, and has made a spirited case for New York's version. It is good to know that a chief executive can hold a strong opinion about something that requires neither a funding round nor a product roadmap.

Her professional ambitions remain tied to the ordinary mechanics of independence: getting paid, understanding the records, having more time for the business itself. Lili has moved well beyond its early freelance account, but those mechanics still organize the story. Bar David's career has given her experience in the financial system and a reason to keep asking what the customer must do after using it. The second job that comes with owning a business is persistent. She has spent her entrepreneurial years trying to make its hours shorter.