Matan Bar and the education of a paper check

Before there was a payments platform, there were envelopes. Matan Bar and his colleagues wanted to understand how American small businesses paid their suppliers. Their opening move was to offer bookkeeping. Customers sent invoices, the team handled the payments, and someone had to deal with the paper. For a group setting out to build a technology company, this was a rather literal introduction to the competition.

The experiment served ten small businesses for roughly four months. Its value lay in the chores. A payment required instructions, timing, an accounting entry and a recipient who expected the money to arrive in a particular way. An interview could collect opinions about those steps. Doing the work exposed the awkward joins between them. Before automating the process, the founders put themselves inside it.

That choice gives Bar’s career a useful starting point. He had already built a company and led global consumer payments at PayPal. He arrived with experience of moving money at scale. Yet his new business required him to become a beginner again. The knowledge that mattered was sitting in somebody else’s unpaid invoices.

Today he is Xero US CEO, responsible for the combined Xero and Melio US businesses after Xero acquired Melio in 2025. The distance between ten bookkeeping customers and that job is considerable. The connection is easier to miss: both involve getting an owner’s payment instructions and accounting records to agree, preferably before the owner has to spend another evening sorting them out.

A gift, shared among friends

Bar’s earlier venture addressed a smaller social complication: several people buying one present. The Gifts Project allowed friends to contribute toward a group purchase. He co-founded it with Ron Gura, Maya Gura and Erez Dickman, serving as chief product officer. The arrangement was familiar to anyone who has volunteered to collect birthday money, then discovered that volunteering comes with a collections department.

In September 2011, eBay acquired the technology and team. The startup had already been powering eBay’s Group Gifts offering. It became the basis of eBay’s Israel Social Center, with Bar moving into the head-of-product role. A young company had found a route into a much larger business by making itself useful inside an existing shopping experience.

That sequence matters more than an exit price. The product entered a place where people already shopped. Years later, Melio would pursue distribution through software and financial institutions that businesses already used. The settings differed, but the practical attraction was similar: reaching customers through a familiar doorway can spare them the work of finding another one.

Bar holds a computer science and management degree from Tel Aviv University. His career subsequently crossed eBay and PayPal, taking him from group purchases into peer-to-peer payments. There, the consumer experience supplied a provocation. Sending money to a friend was becoming easier. Paying another business could still involve a checkbook. The person might be the same; the paperwork had changed costumes.

The invoice arrived on WhatsApp

Melio began in 2018 with Bar, Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz. The founders were examining a market in which the everyday act of paying a vendor contained enough small exceptions to frustrate a neat software diagram. Knowing that checks existed was straightforward. Understanding why an owner kept using them required closer observation.

In the manual service, invoices arrived over WhatsApp. An early employee, Dafna, mailed checks and updated the customers’ accounting software. Bar remembered a New Jersey juice business among those first customers, and remembered receiving heart emojis. Accounts payable rarely gets fan mail. Apparently, taking the chore away improved its prospects.

The revealing detail is the reply. A customer needed to know that an instruction had been received and acted upon. Software would eventually have to carry that reassurance along with the money. A button marked “pay” was only one part of the job. The surrounding confirmations, records and choices were part of what the customer was buying.

This is why the experiment belongs near the center of Bar’s story. It replaced the founders’ assumptions with obligations to actual businesses. A small service made the problem observable. The team could learn what happened between receiving a bill and recording its payment, including the work an owner might forget to mention because it had become so ordinary.

The main thing acquires a meeting

By September 2021, Melio announced a $250 million Series D at a $4 billion valuation. The company reported that monthly payment-processing volume had increased 5,000 percent over the preceding eighteen months. Those figures describe a particular period of expansion. They also set up a different management problem: how to keep an organization attentive when money, recruits and potential projects arrive together.

Bar’s answer included a deliberately repetitive reminder: “Keep the main thing the main thing.” The phrase appeared in discussions of product priorities. Its slight clumsiness is useful. A tidy slogan can pass unnoticed; this one sounds as though someone has interrupted the meeting to ask what, exactly, everybody came to do.

In his account of hiring, Bar has also acknowledged putting too much weight on skills relative to culture. The early employees give a company its working personality. That makes recruitment a series of decisions about how future conversations will sound: who listens, who argues, and how a mistake gets corrected. The impressive résumé does not settle those questions.

There is a geographic complication, too. Melio combined US customer-facing operations with an Israeli engineering base. Bar described practices that brought customer voices into the company, including interviews and recordings. An engineer can be excellent at building a requested feature while remaining far from the circumstances that produced the request. Listening helps shorten that distance.

“Keep the main thing the main thing.”Matan Bar

A sentence fit for a president

Bar has a good story about explaining Melio to George W. Bush. Meeting the former president at an event, he chose the company’s promise to keep small businesses in business rather than an explanation of its payments infrastructure. The encounter, as Bar tells it, became a conversation about small business. An accounts-payable specification would have required a more patient audience.

The wording had been sharpened with Michael Eisenberg, the Aleph investor and Melio board member. Their discussions pushed the company toward a description that an owner could recognize. There is a useful discipline in that exercise: a founder has to explain why the work deserves attention without making the listener complete a short course in the industry first.

The sentence also exposes an ambition that can be obscured by fintech vocabulary. A business owner needs the supplier paid and the books updated. The owner would generally prefer to return to selling wine, making juice or running the shop. Bar’s product story gives that preference a central place. The technology earns its role by reducing the interruption.

His professional connections span several chapters: the Gifts Project team, PayPal colleagues, the Melio co-founders, Eisenberg and now Xero’s leadership. They are reminders that the familiar solo-founder photograph can be misleading. The decisions in this story were made among partners, employees, investors and customers, each contributing a different view of what needed fixing.

The next ledger

Xero announced its agreement to acquire Melio in June 2025 and completed the transaction on October 15. The announced consideration was $2.5 billion upfront, with up to another $500 million in contingent payments. A financing valuation and an acquisition price measure different transactions at different times. Neither figure should be mistaken for Bar’s personal wealth.

The deal brought payments closer to accounting. For Bar, the combined US responsibility extends the same practical question across a broader product: can a business capture a bill, approve it, pay it and reconcile the result without repeatedly carrying information between tools? The elegance of the idea depends on the less elegant details working reliably.

In May 2026, he described an ambition to connect accounting, payments, payroll and analytics, with AI handling routine work while owners and accountants retain judgment. He also advocated modern payment infrastructure and greater control over financial data. These are stated goals. Their value to a customer will emerge in completed tasks, clearer records and time recovered.

August supplied a more tangible development. Melio launched expense management that lets businesses retain their existing cards. Receipt collection, categorization and accounting synchronization sit around the card transaction. The owner is offered an improvement without first having to replace a familiar payment habit. Bar described accountants’ demand to bring expenses and accounts payable into one place.

What the envelope knew

There is an appealing consistency between that launch and the old bookkeeping service. Both begin with the arrangements a customer already has. A supplier may expect a check. An owner may like a particular card. An accountant may have a preferred ledger. A useful product has to negotiate with those preferences, which seldom arrive arranged in a convenient order.

Bar’s progression from shared gifts to consumer transfers to business bills can look like a sequence of financial products. It also reads as a continuing interest in coordination: several friends contributing, two people exchanging money, an owner and supplier agreeing on payment. Moving funds is essential. Making the people and records line up is where much of the work accumulates.

The challenge of his current role is preserving that close view inside a larger organization. Acquisition announcements have their own vocabulary of platforms and integration. The ten early customers offered a plainer standard. They sent an instruction and expected somebody to take care of it. A growing company inherits more ways to disappoint that expectation, alongside more resources to meet it.

The envelope makes a modest ending for a multibillion-dollar transaction. It deserves the space. Long before the acquisition, Bar’s team learned by completing a task that their future software was supposed to remove. The paper check was both a payment method and a teacher. The continuing assignment is to give the business owner less homework.