The modern checkout has learned many tricks. It can remember a card, split a restaurant bill, summon a car, or turn a phone into a cash register. Yet for years, one of America’s largest payment programs reached the internet like a guest arriving with an invitation written in invisible ink. SNAP benefits worked in stores, but accepting them online demanded a PIN flow, item-level eligibility, special tax treatment, split payments, government approval, and patience in industrial quantities.
Ofek Lavian met this problem from the inside. At Instacart, where he led consumer payments, retailers kept asking when they could accept EBT online. During the pandemic, online grocery shopping had leapt from convenience to necessity. The major payment companies had elegant APIs for ordinary cards. None had the product his team needed for food benefits. The available route worked, but getting retailers such as Aldi and Publix through it took roughly nine months.
A long integration can become a complaint, a war story, or a company. Lavian chose the third option. He joined Forage, became its co-founder and CEO, and helped turn a stubborn exception in the payments system into the center of the product. The result is infrastructure used at more than 100,000 stores across all 50 states, alongside a newer consumer app designed to let families check EBT balances, find participating stores, save on groceries, and earn rewards.
A founder trained by the receipt
Lavian’s taste for practical businesses arrived early. He was born in Israel and moved to the United States with his family at four. Money in his immigrant household was handled carefully. He shared a 1998 Dodge Caravan with his sister and became the first in his family to attend an American college. At USC, he enrolled in work-study and spent his first weekend calling alumni for donations. People hung up. He quit the job, but not the requirement to support himself.
Walking around campus, he noticed a small economy displayed across students’ chests. Clubs, Greek organizations, and intramural teams all wanted shirts. Los Angeles had apparel suppliers. USC had graphic-design students whose work felt sharper than generic campus merchandise. Lavian borrowed $180 from his mother to file the paperwork for Campus Ink Apparel. He was 17.
The company reached six-figure sales within quarters. It also had the sort of margins that turn celebration into arithmetic: close to 80 percent of revenue went to costs. Printing mistakes delayed orders. College students were learning operations while performing them. The lesson Lavian kept was admirably unsentimental. Revenue is not quality, and low price is not a durable advantage.
Campus Ink was acquired in 2013. Lavian moved into Deloitte Consulting, then into the machinery of internet marketplaces. At Uber he worked on payments across more than 60 countries, including tipping, gift cards, Uber Cash, and the company’s Visa card. A product manager in payments learns that the cheerful button marked “Pay” is merely the lobby. Behind it sits a crowded building of banks, networks, ledgers, local rules, edge cases, and reconciliation.
After a product role at Sonder, he joined Instacart in 2020. Grocery delivery was surging. Lavian grew the payments team from five people to 50 and oversaw products including PayPal, gift cards, stored value, and EBT. He has called the EBT launch the highlight of his career there. It also supplied a valuable irritation: why should every grocer have to rebuild the same regulated plumbing?
The paperwork is the moat
Forage’s opportunity is easy to misunderstand because the visible transaction looks so ordinary. A customer adds cereal, vegetables, soap, and batteries to a basket. Some items qualify for SNAP and others do not. Eligible food may be tax exempt. The payment must divide correctly between an EBT card and another method. The retailer must be authorized. The PIN must remain secure. Every layer produces another place for a checkout to fail.
Forage packages those jobs into merchant APIs, software development kits, dashboards, certification support, and processing. Its value is partly technical and partly bureaucratic. The company guides merchants through USDA authorization and launch, then gives operators the reporting and reliability expected from modern payment software. It is fintech as translation work: a federal program on one side, a retailer’s checkout on the other, and very little tolerance for improvisation between them.
Lavian learned at Instacart that a large company could assemble the people required to push through the process. Smaller retailers could not casually lend 40 or 50 employees to a payment method. Forage’s bet was that they should not have to. The hard-won knowledge could become a shared rail instead of a repeated ordeal.
The choice of market also says something about Lavian’s operating temperament. Many payment startups begin with affluent customers and frequent card spend. Forage walked toward an ecosystem marked by dense rules, public agencies, retailer integrations, and families watching every dollar. It was not an obvious route to a quick demo. It was a route to a useful one.
His family history made the subject personal without making the product sentimental. Lavian’s father was born in Iran and reached Israel as a refugee; public assistance shaped his early life. On his mother’s side, his grandparents survived the Holocaust and severe hunger. At home, leaving food on the plate was treated as a moral error. Years later, hundreds of user interviews at Instacart gave the inherited story a product vocabulary: access, time, choice, and the quiet indignities caused by a declined transaction.
Rituals for an unglamorous mission
By early 2023, Forage had grown from three people in Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch to roughly 30. Lavian described the culture in terms of missionaries rather than mercenaries, borrowing a phrase he remembered from Uber. The distinction can sound theatrical until it meets the calendar. At a remote company, conviction needs recurring appointments.
Monday began with every department naming its priorities so colleagues could offer help. Friday brought Lavian’s favorite hour: a company retrospective led by a rotating teammate. Everyone added what went well, what went wrong, who deserved praise, and what should be learned. The ceremony is simple enough to steal. Its purpose is less simple. Remote work removes the accidental conversation, so the company must deliberately manufacture candor.
Lavian’s management style is direct and intensely involved. He has publicly challenged the blanket idea that micromanagement is always bad, arguing instead for leaders to engage closely where their judgment can raise the quality of the work. He is also skeptical of titles as a substitute for responsibility. Both positions fit the company he chose to build. Regulated payments punish the executive who considers details someone else’s department.
The network grew through connections that joined payments expertise to grocery reach. Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta became an investor. PayPal Ventures and fintech specialist Nyca Partners backed the company. Retail and delivery partners came to include Dollar General, Save A Lot, Gopuff, DoorDash, and Uber Eats. In June 2026, Mouro Capital led a $40 million Series B with returning and new investors. Forage said the round brought total funding to $75 million.
From rails to the grocery aisle
Forage’s consumer app, launched in late 2025, marks a subtle expansion of the original idea. The company began by helping merchants accept benefits. The app addresses the family’s side of the transaction: checking an EBT balance, discovering participating stores, finding eligible items, and earning grocery rewards. By June 2026, it had been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The stated goal is to reach one million families by the end of the year.
The move gives Forage two views of affordability. Merchant infrastructure can make a payment possible. A consumer product can help a family decide where and how to use it. Lavian describes this as a network for affordability, one that helps retailers grow by serving price-conscious shoppers while giving those shoppers more ways to stretch a grocery budget.
In August 2026, the story bent back toward Instacart. Forage announced that its EBT payments would work on Instacart’s Caper Carts, allowing SNAP shoppers to check their balance and pay directly on the smart cart. The old employer had become a partner. More neatly, the product that sent Lavian toward Forage returned in a form that put the payment experience into the cart itself.
Lavian’s ambition extends beyond SNAP. He has spoken about broader restricted-payment categories and government benefits, markets where money arrives with instructions attached. The opportunity is large, but its appeal is more interesting than its size. These are systems most founders encounter and politely walk around. They involve regulation, old infrastructure, multiple stakeholders, and public consequences. Forage treats those qualities as the assignment.
There is an old startup habit of calling difficult industries “broken,” as if a clever interface might shame them into repair. Lavian’s approach is less decorative. Learn the rules. Sit through the certification. Build the PIN flow. Reconcile the basket. Answer the retailer’s call. The result may look like a normal checkout, which is precisely the point. Infrastructure earns its keep when the customer no longer has to admire the difficulty.
At 17, Lavian discovered that a colorful shirt could be a better product but still a poor business if the operations failed. At Uber and Instacart, he discovered that a clean payment screen rests on unruly machinery. At Forage, those lessons have converged in a company whose best work should feel almost boring to the person buying dinner. That is a peculiar kind of ambition: to make dignity so reliable that nobody notices the engineering.