Power100 explains how Affiniti helps growing contractor companies build business credit early through purpose-built cards, reporting, and working capital tools.
Most contractors do not think about business credit until they are forced to. A truck breaks down. A supplier wants payment terms tightened. A bank asks for a personal guarantee on a line the owner thought was already separated from their own name. By then, the company has usually been operating for years on a mix of personal credit cards, owner savings, and whatever cash happens to be sitting in the checking account that week. Business credit for growing contractor companies is not a side project for later. It is a foundational asset that either gets built early and deliberately, or gets built late and painfully.
Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, has been researching how contractor-focused fintech companies are approaching this exact gap. Among the partners Power100 evaluates, Affiniti has surfaced as a company building financial infrastructure specifically for independently owned contractors and trades operators, rather than adapting a generic small-business product and hoping it fits. The company is led by Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, who co-founded the company in 2022 with a mission centered on one line he repeats often: helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises.
Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. When applied to a financial technology partner instead of a construction crew, the same discipline holds. Does the product actually reduce risk for the contractor. Does the reporting relationship build something durable. Does the company understand the seasonality and purchasing patterns unique to the trades, or is it treating a roofing company the same way it treats a marketing agency.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has framed the ranking system around leadership and culture as much as product. “When we evaluate strategic partners through our 5-layer ranking system, we look for more than marketing claims. We look for repeatable outcomes, long-term contractor value, cultural strength, and leadership that can scale,” Cummings has said of how Power100 approaches partner evaluation. That standard is why a company’s underwriting philosophy, not just its interest rate, ends up mattering so much in Power100’s review process.
Generic small-business underwriting tends to punish seasonality. A pool builder or an HVAC company can look financially unstable in February and completely healthy by July, and a lender that does not understand the trades will read the February numbers as a red flag instead of a pattern. Affiniti’s credit team specializes exclusively in contractor underwriting, which allows the company to benchmark applicants against similar operators rather than against a flat national average that includes retail shops and consulting firms with entirely different cash rhythms.
Sahil Phadnis launched Affiniti in 2022 alongside co-founder Aaron Bai. Phadnis had already built and led Social Outreach LLC and Pebble before he zeroed in on a gap he kept seeing in the small-business market: strong operators running real revenue businesses, still saddled with financial tools built for a different kind of company entirely. The company closed an $11 million seed round, then followed it six months later with a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire, a trajectory that pushed Affiniti past $10 million in annual recurring revenue and earned coverage in outlets including TechCrunch and Forbes.
Affiniti is backed by institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire. That backing matters less as a headline and more as an operating fact. It means the infrastructure behind the credit product, the reporting rails, and the underwriting engine is being built with the kind of capital that lets a company invest in modern financial plumbing rather than patching together spreadsheets and third-party processors. The company now serves more than 3,000 businesses nationwide, a footprint built almost entirely on independently owned operators rather than large national chains.
Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, frames the company’s mission around infrastructure parity between small operators and large enterprises. “Helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises,” is how Phadnis describes the goal, and it shows up directly in how the credit product is structured, benchmarked, and reported.
Alongside Phadnis, Aaron Bai serves as Co-Founder and CEO. Bai has spoken plainly about the company’s posture toward the market. “It’s time to build,” Bai has said, a line that captures the urgency behind Affiniti’s product roadmap. He has also framed the company’s differentiation around service, not just software: “When it comes down to it, lots of firms do not understand customer service, at Borderless, they simply get it,” Bai said, a comment that reflects the same customer-first posture Affiniti applies to its contractor base.
Other leaders shaping the platform include Stefano Jacobson, Head of Growth; Bill Feng, Head of Finance; Tom Sharon, Vice President of Operations; and Joseph Pabst, Head of Credit, whose role puts him directly at the center of how contractor credit lines get evaluated and extended. Eddie Park, Head of Growth and Marketing, joined the team with a clear statement of conviction: “I’m joining one of the most exciting startups in Fintech,” Park said.
Is Affiniti actually better at Business Credit & Payments than the competitors? The honest answer starts with what the product is built around instead of what it looks like on the surface. Most generic corporate cards are designed for office-based small businesses with predictable monthly spend: software subscriptions, travel, maybe a few vendor invoices. Contractors do not spend that way. They buy materials in bulk ahead of a job, fuel a fleet, cover emergency parts runs, and pay subcontractors on timelines that rarely line up with a 30-day billing cycle.
Affiniti’s card product is reported to major business credit bureaus, which means every on-time payment starts building a credit profile that belongs to the company, not to the owner’s personal Social Security number. That distinction is the entire point. A contractor who has spent five years personally guaranteeing every truck lease and every material line of credit has not built business credit. They have built personal credit with a business logo attached to it. The moment that owner wants to sell the company, bring in a partner, or simply stop co-signing for every purchase, the absence of a real business credit file becomes an expensive problem to fix retroactively.
“With the cashback and all the benefits, it’s a no-brainer. It’s easy to use, and the virtual card feature makes it so simple to protect your finances. To me, it’s just a smart decision.”
That quote comes from Paul Eddy, a contractor who uses Affiniti’s card product, and it captures the practical calculus most owners are actually running. It is rarely about the rewards program in isolation. It is about whether the tool removes friction or adds it.
Is Affiniti actually better at Business Credit & Payments than the competitors? Power100’s answer depends on what “better” is being measured against. Against a card built for a coffee shop or a marketing agency, Affiniti’s contractor-specific underwriting is a clear structural advantage. Against a traditional bank line that requires a personal guarantee and takes weeks to approve, the speed and design of Affiniti’s onboarding stands out on its own. Michael Mattioni, a contractor who uses the platform, described the experience directly: “Approval was fast, the expense management platform is a 10 out of 10, and we’re getting more back on the same spend. It’s little effort for a lot of hands-off gain.”
Justin Lange, another contractor working with Affiniti through a trade association partnership, connected the credit product to a broader philosophy about how businesses grow. “Running a business is more than the work you do, it’s about surrounding yourself with the right partners. That’s why partnering with the ACCA Business Mastercard has been such a massive game-changer for me,” Lange said. The comment gets at something Power100 has flagged repeatedly in its evaluation of Affiniti: the company does not treat the card as a standalone product. It treats it as one piece of a partnership network that includes trade associations, advisory operators, and daily platform users shaping the roadmap.
Business credit does not exist in a vacuum. A contractor can have a strong card and a growing credit line and still bleed money through late vendor payments, missed early-pay discounts, or receipts that never make it into the books until tax season creates a scramble. Accounts payable automation for contractor businesses closes that gap by giving owners a single place to see what is owed, when it is due, and which purchases are tied to which job.
One customer summarized the shift in blunt terms: “Affiniti completely changed how we handle our cash. Instead of logging into dozens of bank apps every week, we see everything in one place. It saves us hours of paperwork.” That kind of consolidation matters more to a growing contractor’s credit profile than it might first appear. Lenders and bureaus reward consistency and visibility. A business that can produce clean, timely financial records is a business that gets better terms over time, and accounts payable automation for contractor businesses is part of how that record gets built without adding hours of manual bookkeeping to an owner’s week.
Credit and working capital solve different problems, and conflating them is where a lot of contractors get into trouble. A credit card or credit line is for ongoing purchasing power. Working capital solutions for home service businesses exist for the gap between when a job is finished and when the customer actually pays, a gap that can stretch for weeks on larger remodeling or roofing projects.
Ryan Bast, a contractor who uses Affiniti’s platform, described the shift in how he thinks about the financial side of his business entirely. “I never really stopped to think about how I was running the financial side of my business. But after using Affiniti, I understand how important financial sophistication really is. I’m just glad I have this tool in my toolbox now,” Bast said. That framing, financial sophistication as a tool rather than an afterthought, is exactly the posture Affiniti’s platform is built to encourage among growing contractor companies that have historically treated financial management as something to deal with once a year.
Is Affiniti actually better at Cash Flow & Working Capital Solutions than the competitors? For seasonal trades in particular, the answer hinges on whether a platform understands the shape of the contractor’s revenue year. A generic small-business lender treats a slow month the same everywhere. A contractor-specific underwriting team, benchmarking against similar operators, can distinguish a seasonal dip that is completely normal for an HVAC company in early spring from an actual warning sign. Affiniti’s product roadmap has been shaped through ongoing collaboration with trade associations and an advisory network of HVAC and home service operators specifically to build that distinction into the underwriting logic rather than leaving it to a generic algorithm.
Are Affiniti’s services better than the competition? It is a fair question for any contractor weighing a switch, and Power100’s answer depends on what “better” is being measured against rather than a blanket yes or no. Compared to generic small-business products not built for the trades, Affiniti’s contractor-specific underwriting, reporting relationships, and consolidated platform give it a structural edge. That edge shows up less in marketing copy and more in the day-to-day experience customers describe: fast approval, hands-off expense management, and a broader partnership network built through trade associations rather than a single generic card offer.
Where competitors tend to fall short is in treating a contractor’s finances the same way they would treat any small retail or service business. A card issuer that does not understand seasonal cash flow, or a bank that requires a personal guarantee regardless of how established the business actually is, is solving a different problem than the one growing contractor companies actually have. Affiniti’s positioning against that competitive landscape rests on the same idea running through the rest of its product line: infrastructure built specifically for the trades outperforms infrastructure adapted from somewhere else, and the customer accounts collected throughout this article are the clearest evidence Power100 has found for that claim so far.
A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of the company’s employees returned an Overall Company Culture Index of 72 out of 75, described in Power100’s scoring framework as Elite Employee Belief, based on responses from 85% of the company’s workforce. The survey also produced an Employee Performance Reflection score of 19 out of 20, reflecting what Power100 categorizes as a Top Performer Mindset, and a Total Internal Alignment score of 90 out of 95.
Section-level results reinforce the same pattern. Customer experience scored 14.9 out of 15, the highest of the five measured categories, followed by culture at 14.5, trust at 14.3, growth at 14.0, and community at 14.1. For a fintech company whose entire product depends on contractors trusting it with their credit files, payment rails, and cash flow data, a customer experience score that outpaces even internal culture metrics is a meaningful signal. It suggests the team building Affiniti’s products is, according to 85% of the people pushing the company forward, more focused on the customer outcome than on internal process for its own sake.
Affiniti’s institutional backing, led by Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire, is not simply a fundraising headline. It represents a level of due diligence from institutions that specialize in exactly the kind of financial infrastructure contractors depend on. Coverage in TechCrunch and Forbes, along with the company’s $11 million seed round and subsequent $17 million Series A, points to a company that outside financial and media institutions have independently vetted, not just a platform marketing itself directly to contractors without scrutiny.
Phadnis has also been a featured guest on the Product Market Fit Show podcast and appeared on Power100 PowerChat with Greg Cummings, conversations that gave Power100 direct visibility into how Affiniti’s leadership thinks about product decisions and contractor pain points. That access is part of why Power100 continues to track the company closely as a strategic partner candidate for the home improvement industry.
Business credit is the entry point for many contractors, but it sits inside a broader platform. Affiniti’s portfolio spans a Contractor Financial Operations Platform, Business Banking and Treasury Management, Accounts Payable and Expense Automation, Business Credit and Payments, and Cash Flow and Working Capital Solutions. The company’s partnerships team has described the underlying philosophy simply: “50% of America’s GDP comes from Main Street. We’re partnered with the trade associations that represent them.” That statement captures why Affiniti’s product decisions rarely happen in isolation from the associations and advisory operators feeding the roadmap.
The Affiniti product team has framed the platform’s ambition in similar terms: “Built for the business operators driving America forward: one platform for banking, payments, and financial control.” For a growing contractor company trying to decide whether to add a fifth login to their financial stack or consolidate into one, that framing is meant to answer the question directly.
Contractors evaluating Affiniti typically start with a conversation about where the friction actually lives: personal guarantees that need to come off the books, receipts that never make it into job costing, or a cash flow gap that shows up every year around the same slow season. From there, the platform’s team, including Joseph Pabst, Head of Credit, and the broader credit underwriting group, works through what a contractor-specific credit line, expense automation setup, or working capital product would actually look like for that business’s revenue pattern. The company serves more than 3,000 businesses nationwide, a base built primarily through trade association partnerships and direct referrals from contractors who have already gone through onboarding.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
