Rom Lakritz and the work of getting paid

An idea for a billing company arrived on a ski lift. Rom Lakritz was on a snowboarding trip, going uphill, when the problem of getting businesses paid became the seed of Anchor. It is an agreeable setting for a financial revelation: briefly suspended, with very little paperwork within reach. The eventual company would spend its time on something considerably less picturesque - the space between an agreement to do work and the money arriving for it.

For Lakritz, that space was familiar territory. His career had taken him through finance, operations and several startups. Different companies kept encountering the same administrative obstacle. Someone delivered a service. Someone else intended to pay. Between those two apparently compatible ambitions stood invoices, manual checks, reminders and opportunities for mistakes. He had found a problem capable of following an entrepreneur from one business to the next.

Flowers before financial statements

Lakritz traces his entrepreneurial beginnings to sixth grade, when his small ventures included flowers, babysitting and parties. Those are rather good introductions to commerce. Flowers require a buyer; babysitting requires trust; a party requires people to turn up. His adult work would keep returning to customers, confidence and the practical business of making an arrangement function.

His formal education gave that instinct a more technical vocabulary. At the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, now Reichman University, he studied law, accounting and business management, earning an LL.B. and a B.A. His studies ran from 2006 to 2010. He later completed the ECFO Strategic Financial Leadership Executive Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2017. The distinction matters: Stanford was an executive program, while his undergraduate degrees came from Herzliya.

A certified public accountant with legal training can see several different documents inside a single invoice. There is the commercial promise, the accounting entry and the set of obligations between two parties. Lakritz's subsequent choice of problem makes sense against that education. He was interested in the machinery that carries an agreement into everyday business.

His early career included senior consulting at Ernst & Young and business analysis for venture capital firms. He co-founded Tipengo and served as its CEO. At Fireglass, the browser isolation company, his responsibilities covered finance and operations. Symantec acquired Fireglass in 2017; accounts of the deal put the price at $250 million. Lakritz subsequently worked in business operations and finance at Symantec.

That history is useful context for Anchor. Selling a company and collecting a customer payment operate on very different scales, but both depend on the details surviving the journey between an agreement and its execution. After working inside those systems, Lakritz went looking for a recurring problem he could build a business around.

The agreement had been sitting there all along

Anchor's founding team brought together Lakritz as CEO, Omry Man as chief revenue officer and Leeor Aharon as chief technology officer. The business paired finance experience with software and security backgrounds. Its central proposition was unusually specific: the client agreement should carry the information needed to run billing and collection.

A signed PDF can look reassuringly finished. It has signatures, dates and the solemn appearance of something settled. But the business still needs someone to read the terms, work out what has been delivered, prepare an invoice and follow the payment through. The document has completed its ceremonial duties while leaving a considerable amount of work for everyone else.

Lakritz described Anchor's alternative as an agreement “understandable by humans and computers.” Payment terms and authorization become part of the arrangement at the beginning. The system can then generate invoices, collect payment according to the agreed rules and reconcile the result. When an engagement changes, the agreement can change with it, with the relevant client approval.

The personal thread here is an operator's impatience with repeated translation. An agreement says one thing; a billing system needs it entered again; an accounting package needs its own record. Each handoff invites another person to interpret the original promise. Anchor's design tries to keep that promise connected to the transaction.

A trust problem with a payment attached

Lakritz's explanation begins with an observation about the two sides of a business relationship. A service provider wants to do the work and receive payment. The customer wants the work completed and expects to pay for it. Their interests already overlap. His ambition is to make the administrative process behave as though it has noticed.

That is why his discussion of payments so often becomes a discussion of trust. A customer needs confidence in the charge. A provider needs confidence that the agreed process will happen. Putting the terms and payment arrangements together gives both parties a shared reference point. The familiar consumer experience of leaving payment details with an online merchant provides a useful comparison for his thinking.

He also writes about the employees caught in the middle. In a February 2022 essay, Lakritz argued that small businesses should first identify their operational bottlenecks, then choose software to relieve them. Automating repetitive administration could release staff for more valuable work. It is a practical account of technology's purpose: a business has a limited number of working hours, and copying payment information consumes some of them.

For a founder whose own work has included operations, this is a revealing emphasis. He describes an opportunity in how people spend a day. The accounting entries matter, but so does the employee who has to create them, check them and explain why the payment has yet to arrive.

Capital, with the paperwork attached

Anchor announced a $15 million seed round in December 2021, with backing from Rapyd Ventures, Entrée Capital and Tal Ventures. In January 2025, it announced a further $20 million Series A. Mosaic General Partnership and Oren Zeev led that round, while existing investors also participated.

The later investor group included Zuora founder Tien Tzuo and, through Mosaic, Andre Iguodala. Amy Banse joined as an investor and was announced as a new board member. For Lakritz, the transaction connected his billing company with people who had built, financed or overseen businesses well beyond its initial market.

His own fundraising advice is more cautious than a list of investors might suggest. Writing for entrepreneurs in 2022, he emphasized timing, differentiation and evidence that customers actually wanted a product. He also urged founders to investigate prospective investors. A signed term sheet begins a relationship with consequences; understanding the person on the other side is part of the work.

There is a consistent interest in agreements here, whether the counterpart is a client or an investor. Clear expectations have value before anyone transfers money. Lakritz's writing treats the relationship after the signature as something worth examining carefully.

A book club enters the billing business

His advice to other business owners also places weight on persistence, communication and planning. In a July 2023 discussion about entrepreneurship, he encouraged owners to keep asking what they wanted a feature or decision to achieve. Customer feedback belonged close to that process. The goal should remain visible while the business accumulates demands.

These priorities give his public persona a less formal edge than his qualifications might imply. In 2025, Anchor's Haley Kershner introduced herself to customers with a copy of The Four Agreements, a book she said had influenced how she showed up for other people. Lakritz shared the gesture and floated the prospect of a virtual book club. A company built around agreements had found an unusually literal reading assignment.

The book was Kershner's selection. Lakritz's contribution was to make room for the personal introduction and invite a conversation around it. Customer responses thanked the team for the gift. It is a small episode, but a concrete one: the company was communicating with people through something other than a product announcement or a request to renew.

“Persistence would go a very, very long way into success.”

Rom Lakritz, discussing advice for entrepreneurs

That sentiment also appears in his advice about handling outcomes. He cautions entrepreneurs against becoming too pleased with achievements or too consumed by failures. Read alongside the emphasis on preparation and feedback, persistence becomes the willingness to continue learning while the results remain uneven.

The office fits in a pocket

By August 18, 2026, the next development was something a firm owner could carry. In a launch article under his name, Lakritz introduced Anchor's iOS and Android applications. Customers could send proposals, update agreements and track invoices and payments from a phone, using the same account as the browser version.

The announcement kept his original ambition close to the surface: “Getting paid shouldn't feel like work.” Pricing remained $5 per payment received, with no subscription required. The phone changed where the user could act on an agreement, while the connected billing workflow remained the point.

His public updates also describe Anchor's Claude integration, which lets users work with proposals, agreements and billing information through conversation. In that account, financial transfers still require human action. The newer interface returns to the same underlying requirement: the business needs organized agreements and usable records before another tool can help it work.

The distance from a ski lift to a mobile application is measured in years of considerably less recreational effort. Lakritz's story gives that effort a recognizable object. Across the childhood ventures, the accounting education, the operations jobs and the company he now leads, he keeps circling the work required to make a business function. The invoice is a particularly persistent specimen. He would like it to require less of everyone's afternoon.