Q&A with Luke Voiles

Today it’s my pleasure to present my latest Q&A with the CEO at Pipe, Luke Voiles.

Before we start, I would like to suggest:

• If you haven’t done this yet, follow him on LinkedIn here,
• You can also follow Pipe to learn how they make capital accessible for founders and entrepreneurs.

Let’s get to it!

How did you get into FinTech?

I actually started out as a distressed-credit private equity investor, where I spent a decade looking at bad loans and learned a lot about risk and credit. Having grown up in Texas, watching both my dad and my stepdad running their own small businesses, I wanted to be closer to the action and help real business owners survive, not just seeing billions of dollars move around on spreadsheets.

I was fortunate enough to be hired at Intuit where I helped build the Quickbooks Capital business to help customers get access to capital. I was there for five years, and we scaled that business from zero to $2B. Then I moved to Square, where I served as GM of Square Banking and helped connect business owners to loans, credit cards, savings and checking accounts. 

The common thread through it all has been moving closer and closer to where the “rubber meets the road” for mainstreet businesses that just need financial access to operate and thrive and compete. 

What a great background from Intuit and Square. Why did you decide to join Pipe?

I’ve always been passionate about giving SMBs access to financial tools and capital, and Pipe was such a logical next step. They’d raised >$300M to help businesses get capital and they had an incredible team building a great product. Timing matters a lot in your career—just being at the right point at the right time. The founders realized they needed an experienced CEO to help them take it to the next level and the next phase of growth. 

What is Pipe trying to accomplish and why are you excited about it?

We help solve the largest pain point that SMBs have - access to capital. They need capital to grow their business, but it’s extremely difficult for a lot of small businesses to get capital today. Many of them—especially the micro businesses and minority-owned businesses—don’t have the business history to get approved, or don’t even have FICO scores. 

We make capital available within the software to help them run their business. Not only does this make it convenient and simple, but it also allows them to access capital based on their business's performance instead of the lengthy traditional underwriting and paperwork. They can log into their software, see their offers, powered by Pipe, and know they have access when they need it. 

We’re also a true pre-approval partner with really high approval rates—in the high 90% approval rates. A lot of lenders will show you a pre-qualified offer but then disqualify you after, creating a bad merchant experience. We’re eliminating that friction.

To get that capital access in front of the most business owners, we take a B2B2B approach, working with partners to embed financial products in the software business owners use every day. We have the friendliest experience, with a multi-draw line of credit that acts as a security blanket merchants can keep going back to for the life of their offer. 

For partners - we can move extremely fast - and partners can get up and running in days with a Pipe-hosted experience.  They can integrate our embedded UI super quickly, or use our full API to build their own end-to-end customer journey. 

Can you tell us what is next for Pipe?

We’re expanding into more geographies - we’re already live with a partner in the UK and we’re eyeing Canada and Australia next. 

In terms of our product vision, we’ve already solved the #1 painpoint, which is capital. The #2 pain point is spend and expense management, so we’re launching a business card product at the end of the year that’s powered by our risk engine. 

Other companies like Brex and Ramp have focused on mid-market and enterprise, but our risk engine can open up access for micro-merchants and SMBs. We’re able to give them something they’ve never had access to before. Then we’re looking at embeddable payroll, bill pay, etc. and tackling all of these SMB challenges one by one, based on the need. 

What’s one interesting thing most people won’t know about you?

My core focus in life is my family. My wife and I have 4 kiddos from 4 years old to 15 years old. I spend most weekends driving my kids around and watching them play sports. I am committed to the balance a fully remote company offers, and to being a good dad first and a good CEO at the same time.

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