Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Alex Shvarts is the founder of FundKite, one of the fastest-growing alternative funding platforms in the U.S. small business finance market. Since founding the firm in 2015, Shvarts has built FundKite into a fintech operation that has deployed capital to small businesses across the country — operating in the gap left by retreating banks, tightened SBA criteria, and a small business credit market that no longer functions the way it did a decade ago. Recent EPR coverage of the firm documents more than $900 million in capital deployed to over 200,000 small businesses since launch.
Before FundKite, Shvarts engineered and sold proprietary technology to the broader fintech industry. His dual background in software architecture and capital markets is the operating thesis of the firm — FundKite is finance-first, but the underwriting, the reconciliation, the merchant monitoring, and increasingly the 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. The show takes its editorial premise from a single observation: most businesses don't fail because of bad ideas — they fail because they run out of capital. Guests have covered alternative capital strategy, fintech infrastructure, AI tooling for SMBs, lead generation economics inside financial services, and the operational discipline behind compounding growth in funding sales floors.
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, why founder-led long-form audio has become brand-trust infrastructure in alternative finance, and why the alternative funding category is now larger and more critical to the U.S. economy than most policymakers realize.
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.
Only 1 in 10 small businesses gets a loan from its own bank, per the SBA. FundKite approves $100K–$2M in hours. Alex Shvarts on the structural Main Street capital gap.
Most founders fail at delegation. The 2019 framing — independent personality types struggle to let go — is still half right. The 2026 reality is that delegation is also a capital-allocation question. Internal headcount, external contractor, AI model — three destinations, three cost curves, three failure modes. What belongs where.
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