Veeam

Marwan Forzley grew up watching family members run businesses, and he became acutely aware of a pervasive pain point: small businesses spent enormous energy on payment logistics instead of focusing on their core work. They were still cutting checks, sending wires, and creating paper invoices—processes that felt stuck in time. "I'm amazed about the number of things they do that are what I call old fashioned processing," Marwan explained. He decided to "rip that whole thing up" and build Veeam in 2014, a platform designed to make payments feel natural and second-nature for SMBs operating both domestically and across borders.

The path from founding to first customer was longer than most startup stories. Veeam is a heavily regulated payments business, requiring licenses in every state and multiple countries before legally processing money. "It took us like two, three years, just like legal compliance, licensing," Marwan said. This meant the founding team spent the first few years building infrastructure, securing regulatory approval, and preparing the platform for scale rather than acquiring customers. Only in 2017 did commercial customer acquisition really begin in earnest.

When regulatory approval finally came through in 2016, Veeam's first customers were friends and family—"whoever we know between all of us that have access to customers." The founding team simply called them up and asked, "We built this thing. You want to try it? Can you give it a shot and give us feedback?" This initial cohort provided the validation and feedback needed to iterate quickly. Armed with real customer insights, Marwan then hired sales and marketing teams to scale beyond the first 100 customers to hundreds of thousands.

The breakthrough was understanding that SMB acquisition isn't enterprise-style outbound sales. Veeam's most effective channel emerged organically from the product experience itself: 65% of new account signups came from existing customers referring other businesses within their transaction flow. When Company A pays Company B using Veeam, Company B sees an invoice mentioning Veeam and decides to sign up. "It's in the transaction. I send money to you. You'll like it. You say, you know, I'm going to use Veeam to get somebody else to pay you or I'm going to use Veeam to send money to somebody else." This viral loop within payment transactions became Veeam's primary growth engine, rewarding them for building a genuinely delightful experience.

On monetization, Marwan built a diversified revenue model. Foreign exchange (the legacy strength at 0.25-2% margin) remains reliable, while credit card processing (2.9% on card payments) and real-time debit deposits (1%) drive domestic growth. Most recently, an embedded capital program—letting SMBs delay payments with flexible financing at 1-2% monthly (12-24% APR)—launched in August and showed early promise, partnered with external capital providers to minimize balance sheet risk.

By 2017, just three years after founding, Veeam hit $1 million in annual revenue. The company has since doubled its customer base nearly every year, now serving 300,000+ active SMB accounts across 110 countries in 70+ currencies. With $120 million raised (including a $31 million Series C in August of the prior year and recent strategic investment from public company Repay), Veeam scaled to a 160-person team. Marwan estimates the platform processes "billions" in GMV annually, though he declined to disclose exact figures or current MRR. The average SMB customer generates roughly $20 per month in revenue across Veeam's transaction-based model. Goldman Sachs led the Series B and remains a strategic partner. As Marwan reflected, the milestones that mattered most were "first customer, first 100, first 1000, first 10,000"—each a tenfold jump that validated the market and proved the model could scale.