Revenue-based finance channels tens of billions of dollars each year to small businesses that cannot access traditional bank loans.
It also carries a structural bottleneck that few outside the industry ever see.
Once capital is deployed, it is difficult to move.
Receivabull, a Tampa Bay fintech startup, is building a secondary marketplace intended to loosen that constraint and make revenue-based finance more liquid.
The premise is simple. If capital can circulate faster and reach more buyers, costs can eventually come down.
Whether that premise holds at scale remains an open question. But the friction it targets is real.
At its core, Receivabull is not trying to replace revenue-based finance. It is trying to fix the market plumbing that keeps it from scaling.
A market that works but resists scale
Revenue-based finance has existed for decades. Small businesses sell a portion of future revenue in exchange for cash today.
The agreements are non-recourse and structured as sales of future revenue rather than loans, a distinction that courts have repeatedly upheld.
What never developed, according to Receivabull co-founder and chief operating officer George Rajah, is a reliable way to circulate those agreements.
“Once you fund a deal, you’re effectively locked,” Rajah said. “There’s no clean way to sell it or rebalance exposure. The capital just sits there.”
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Most capital moves through one-to-one relationships, where investors back a single originator and wait months for capital to cycle back.
Receivabull is designed to insert flexibility into that system without forcing originators to change how they operate.
Originators connect their existing systems, allowing Receivabull to see live portfolios, price receivables individually and identify which deals are eligible for transfer.
Investors can purchase slices across multiple originators rather than wiring money into a single shop and hoping underwriting holds.
“It’s more like an exchange or marketplace,” Rajah said. “Instead of trusting one originator with all your capital, you’re buying an asset under a legal structure.”
That legal structure is the point. Receivabull is building receivables that are bankruptcy-remote, allowing multiple parties to share exposure in a way institutional investors require.
The underlying merchant contracts remain unchanged.
Why capital stays expensive
Rajah does not frame revenue-based finance as inherently abusive.
He frames it as constrained by how slowly money turns.
“If I have to wait ten months every time I fund a deal, the money moves very slowly,” he said. “If I can originate, sell and redeploy, that changes the economics.”
That friction shapes pricing.
Some small businesses pay what Rajah described as 35 points over eight months. He does not present that as a moral failure. He presents it as a supply problem.
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“There’s already three to one demand,” he said. “The originators can’t get access to capital fast enough. The only way the cost comes down is if you increase the supply.”
In Rajah’s view, pricing pressure is not driven by greed so much as by turnover. When capital cannot move, it becomes scarce. Scarcity shows up in cost.
Receivabull’s bet is that secondary liquidity can attract institutional capital that has stayed on the sidelines. More capital would not eliminate risk. It could change how risk is priced.
Guardrails in a lightly regulated space
Revenue-based finance is not regulated like securities markets. Receivabull does not sell securities and does not charge originators to participate.
That places pressure on internal controls.
Receivabull evaluates originators’ underwriting, servicing, collections and contract language.
It attaches an addendum to contracts to ensure receivables can be transferred cleanly. Originators who fail to meet minimum standards do not get access.
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“If we bring bad paper onto the platform, that’s what investors end up owning,” Rajah said. “So the quality of the originator matters as much as the quality of the deal.”
The screening also reflects a broader tension inside the industry.
Revenue-based finance has faced scrutiny for predatory practices, particularly when merchants lack financial sophistication.
Rajah argues that selective access can exert pressure where regulation does not.
“If bad actors can’t get liquidity and good actors can, the market starts to correct itself,” he said.
That correction, he acknowledges, only works if the platform reaches meaningful scale. Without volume, the leverage remains theoretical.
Two operating models with different risk
Receivabull operates under two structures.
At its core, the platform acts as a neutral intermediary, allowing investors to select assets while Receivabull verifies data accuracy for clean pricing and scoring.
“There’s no risk to us in that model,” Rajah said. “We’re making sure the data is real because the investors have already agreed to how it’s priced.”
That verification role, rather than discretionary underwriting, is what allows Receivabull to remain a neutral layer rather than a broker or lender.
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In a second model, a separate entity can take balance-sheet risk.
Rajah said the company has a $50 million credit facility ready to activate, allowing Receivabull to purchase receivables directly.
That introduces both exposure and optionality.
“We don’t want to be the only buyer,” Rajah said. “We want to be one of many participants in a deeper market.”
From market structure to merchant cash flow
Rajah’s career has followed liquidity rather than lending alone.
He moved from car sales into quantitative hedge funds, working between investment officers and engineers.
He later ran an over-the-counter crypto trading desk and worked at Celsius Network through its bankruptcy, supporting reporting for the bankruptcy court.
“That was a crash course in what happens when liquidity assumptions break,” he said.
His co-founder, Scott Goldman, brings industry depth from more than a decade inside the merchant cash advance sector as a broker, building relationships with hundreds of originators.
“They all said the same thing,” Rajah said. “We have deals we want to fund. We just don’t have enough capital to do it.”
Scaling deliberately from Tampa Bay
Receivabull launched Dec. 24, 2024 and operates out of spARK Labs in St. Petersburg.
Its first year focused on discovery, legal structure and customer feedback before committing to technology.
“We spent months trying to prove our assumptions wrong as fast as possible,” Rajah said.
The company projects roughly $170 million in transaction volume flowing through the platform by summer 2026.
A partnership with LendSaaS is expected to embed Receivabull into software used by about 160 originators, collectively originating roughly $300 million in new paper each month, Rajah said.
Liquidity platforms only work if both sides stay active. Growth, Rajah said, is less about hype than maintaining balance.
A narrower bet than it first appears
Receivabull has raised just under $1 million across 2024 and 2025 and is pursuing a $5 million bridge round.
Additional capital would help activate the credit facility and support product development, including tools for smaller-dollar needs.
Rajah often returns to a simple example.
“A business doesn’t always need fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “Sometimes they need five.”
In today’s market, that choice rarely exists. Merchants either take more capital than they need or walk away.
Receivabull’s longer-term aim is not to flood the market with money. It is to make capital fit better.
If the company succeeds, the change will likely be incremental rather than dramatic.
Liquidity may move faster, risk will remain and pricing pressure could ease at the margins.
For small businesses operating without traditional banking access, those margins are often where survival lives.