Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Alex Shvarts is the founder of FundKite, an alternative funding platform for U.S. small businesses. Since founding the firm in 2015, Shvarts has built FundKite into a fintech operation that provides capital to small businesses that traditional bank lending and SBA programs often do not reach.
Before FundKite, Shvarts engineered and sold proprietary technology to the broader fintech industry. His dual background in software architecture and capital markets shapes the firm: FundKite is finance-first, but its underwriting, reconciliation, merchant monitoring, and increasingly its credit decisioning run on technology Shvarts built.
In 2025, Shvarts launched Unbankable with Alex Shvarts, a weekly long-form podcast distributed across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the FundKite YouTube channel. Its premise is that most businesses fail not because of bad ideas but because they run out of capital. Guests have covered alternative capital strategy, fintech infrastructure, AI tooling for small businesses, and lead generation economics inside financial services.
He is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and a regular source for trade and business press on small business funding, merchant cash advance, revenue-based financing, default and charge-off dynamics, AI underwriting, and credit card processor partnerships with Square, Shopify, and Stripe.
At Everything-PR, Shvarts writes on the structural shifts inside small business capital: what banks no longer see, where the next default cycle is coming from, how AI is reshaping underwriting, and why founder-led long-form audio has become trust infrastructure in alternative finance.
The community bank collapse erased a hundred-year model of relationship credit. The choice is not between alternative funding and bank funding. It is between alternative funding and no funding.
Citation Share is emerging as a critical credit metric for small businesses, influencing lending decisions by providing a measurable, real-time signal of brand presence pulled from AI engines. This article explains how this new input is changing the landscape of small business funding, and outlines steps SMBs should take to optimize their AI visibility.
The first underwriter a small business now meets is not a human. It is an AI engine. And the same is true in reverse — the first vetting a business gets from a prospective customer is no longer a Google search.
More than half of small businesses avoid outside financing. See the four-step sequence owners use to fund growth from operations before taking on debt.
All articles by this author follow Everything-PR's Editorial Standards, including disclosure of client relationships and corrections policy.
