Omri Mor Spent Nine Months Listening Before He Wrote a Line of Code

The first version of Routable was a meal. Omri Mor and Tom Harel were in Tel Aviv, eating hummus and trading complaints about their former companies. Each had built a marketplace. Each had discovered that paying the people on the other side required a private thicket of code: connect Stripe, record the transaction in QuickBooks, route an approval, collect a tax form, answer the vendor asking where the money went. The two founders had independently built much the same unpleasant machinery.

Mor likes to point out that hummus is the opposite of coffee. It is filling. It makes you warm and sleepy. Yet this lethargic lunch produced an energetic question: was the problem peculiar to marketplaces, or did any company making enough business payments eventually collapse into the same monthly scramble?

Plenty of founders would have opened a laptop before the plates were cleared. Mor and Harel flew back to Seattle and opened a spreadsheet.

The patient startThe spreadsheet before the software

For nine months they interviewed people in the office of the CFO. More than 300 finance professionals took part in roughly 450 conversations. The founders asked how payments worked, what broke, which systems were involved and who had to rescue the process. After each interview, they asked for introductions to three more people. Curiosity became a referral engine.

The first 50 conversations established that the pain was real. Mor kept going because evidence of pain did not yet explain where a new company belonged. Stripe could move money. Bill.com served smaller businesses. Coupa served enterprise procurement. The overlooked territory appeared where a growing company handled a thousand or more invoices or payments each month and needed finance controls, operational visibility and developer flexibility in one workflow.

This was market research with a personal test hidden inside it. Mor has said he wanted to know whether he cared enough about the customer to give the work years of attention. He calls it founder-market fit rather than founder-product fit. Products wander. The people you choose to serve remain after the road map has been redrawn.

“If my product didn't exist tomorrow, what would my customers do?”Omri Mor

By the end of those interviews, Mor was no longer a consumer founder inspecting an interesting business category. He had watched talented finance staff spend their days on copying, checking and chasing. The drudgery offended his sense of how capable people should use their time. He and Harel applied to Y Combinator, moved to the Bay Area and began writing code. Their first customer went live ten weeks later.

Learning loopsFrom musicians to money movement

Mor's route to accounts payable was indirect, although not random. He grew up in Tel Aviv with technology nearby. His father taught himself to code, wrote software for a bank and joined Microsoft Israel as it was getting established. His mother worked at MSN Israel and later Microsoft. Mor remembers hanging around the office as a child. He credits his mother, a “business and data mastermind,” with 99.4 percent of his work ethic.

There were early signs of commercial imagination. In kindergarten, he says, he traded holiday donuts for other children's lunches. At 18, while still in school, he worked at a startup and found an adult environment where the youngest person in the room could still be asked for help. The mixture of mission, jokes and respect drew him in. “I work hard,” he has said. “I don't want to work without purpose.”

At the University of Washington, Mor studied business administration with concentrations in marketing and entrepreneurship. He helped launch BadgeFarm, an upvoting and feedback tool whose early customers included the White House. Then came Ziibra, initially built to help musicians turn listeners into paying supporters. It expanded toward artists and makers, then pivoted into e-commerce software for online retailers. Ziibra went through Boost VC and Techstars Seattle.

The company supplied a useful scar. In a 2015 interview, Mor named listening to customers as Ziibra's smartest move and failing to do it early enough as its largest mistake. Routable's nine-month research marathon looks like that lesson, compounded with interest.

The awkward middleAn API and a mouthful of envelopes

Routable's first customer supplied a scene no software launch video could improve. Mor remembers visiting the customer's office and licking envelopes for checks. The team had built an API to send checks partly because nobody wanted to keep doing that. Early automation often arrives this way, with a human crouched beside the last stubborn manual step.

The deeper problem was not simply moving dollars. Engineering had payment rails to maintain. Finance had accounting records and controls. Operations had vendors asking why a payment marked “sent” had not appeared. At higher volumes, those departments became a reluctant ensemble playing from different sheet music.

Mor once compared a consumer payment to a tweet and a business payment to moving a bill through Congress. The joke works because a business payment carries context: a purchase order, an invoice, an approval chain, vendor information, bank details, compliance checks and a final reconciliation. Money movement is only the visible verb. The sentence around it is much longer.

Routable emerged from stealth in 2020 with $16 million raised to date, including a $12 million Series A. In April 2021, Sam Altman and Jack Altman led a $30 million Series B. Flexport joined, along with operators and founders including Marc Benioff, Aaron Levie, Joe Gebbia, Gokul Rajaram and Scott Belsky. Public reporting put total funding at $46 million.

The investors were a glittering list attached to an intentionally dull problem. That contrast is part of the appeal. Finance teams do not need another theatrical dashboard. They need the invoice to enter correctly, the right person to approve it, the vendor to receive the money and the ledger to agree afterward.

Culture as interfaceJam kits and Evil Omri

Mor describes himself as rhythm-oriented. He likes weeks with recognizable patterns and companies where departments understand one another. In Routable's remote all-hands meetings, the first ten minutes have included silly questions and random breakouts. On one Friday, the company skipped the usual meeting and shipped kits so people could make jam together. It is difficult to remain grandiose while discussing fruit set points with colleagues.

His stated aim for an all-hands is empathy across teams, not a longer CEO monologue. “The less that I speak, the better the company does,” he has said, tying ownership to other people having room to explain and celebrate their work.

A darker joke serves another purpose. Routable employees receive scam texts from impostors pretending to be Mor. The company turned the impersonator into an “Evil Omri” Slack emoji, complete with horns and red eyes. Employees share new attempts. Fraud awareness becomes a running office gag, which also makes suspicious messages conspicuous.

“A business payment is more like moving a bill through Congress, where a consumer payment is more like a tweet.”Omri Mor

Mor divides payment fraud into three categories: invoice fraud, vendor fraud and internal fraud. His concern is that prevention often begins only after money has disappeared. When accounting teams spend the month racing to close the books, they have little time to examine the locks. Routable has consequently expanded from workflow automation into vendor verification, fraud signals and AI tools that examine invoices before payment.

The next invoiceAutomation after OCR

In 2025, Mor announced predictive coding at Routable. Traditional optical character recognition can pull a total, date and vendor name from an invoice. Predictive coding tries to infer the accounting treatment that follows: the subsidiary, location, department, class and general ledger code. It aims at the judgment-shaped data entry that remains after the document has been read.

He also wrote about Routable's collaboration with J.P. Morgan and the idea of “Know Your Payee,” extending familiar identity checks toward the person or business about to receive funds. At a San Francisco developer meetup, the two companies demonstrated how APIs could verify a seller's bank account, accept a payment and initiate a payout. The old stack of private integrations was becoming a programmable set of services.

The arc from Ziibra to Routable is more coherent than its categories suggest. Ziibra tried to remove commerce machinery from the path between artists and fans. Routable removes payment machinery from the path between a business and the people it owes. Mor's enduring interest seems to be the same untidy border: where a person's actual work gets trapped inside the system required to support it.

Outside work, he has spoken about basketball, the outdoors, running, cooking for his family, anime and helping other founders on weekends. An older profile notes records, sushi and loyal support for the University of Washington. He once announced that he would build holograms to improve online art buying. Fintech, mercifully, has so far required fewer holograms than invoices.

His useful instinct is less futuristic. Listen until the invisible work becomes visible. Find the point where several people repeat the same weary sentence. Then build with enough speed that the first customer can use it, even if the founder still has to seal the envelopes.