Lavu Adds MCA Product Through Partnership With Parafin

It’s not just DoorDash that Parafin has partnered up with to provide MCA funding. Last week, the restaurant software company Lavu launched Lavu Capital to help restaurants owners access capital.

“We are a restaurant software company that focuses on small and medium restaurants,” said Saleem S. Khatri, CEO of Lavu. “Think of your favorite restaurants that have one or two locations that are really really popular, that are ingrained in the community. We do everything from point of sale to online ordering, payment processing, and anything a restaurant would need to start and grow their business.”

Khatri said that one thing they noticed is that these restaurants have a fundamentally hard time getting loans and that led them to connect with Parafin. Parafin’s product is an advance on future sales, not a loan, and their offerings have been simply integrated into Lavu’s technology. Parafin automatically generates an offer for restaurant owners that they can see in their Lavu dashboard.

“…it’s just really beautifully designed,” said Khatri. “It basically says, ‘Hey, you have an offer to borrow up to $5,000. Do you want it yes or no?’ And you just click ‘yes’ and you’re good to go, the money deposits straight into your bank account, and then you have a repayment schedule. And it just pulls it directly from your bank account according to that repayment schedule.”

Khatri says they haven’t really begun to market the product yet and they’ve just started off with a limited base of customers but that the plan is to roll it out to all their customers around the US. They’d even do it with their customers outside of the US if they could, but the tech is not set up to do that just yet.

“This is going to be a feature and an offering that really really benefits our customers because it gets to the heart of what they need, which is they’re in constant need of liquidity, they’re in constant need of kind of tools to run their business better,” Khatri said. “And it just really fits our portfolio of products that we offer to these customers. So the reception has been awesome.”