Power100 examines how Affiniti's instant payouts and modern payment rails give contractors a working capital edge nationwide, from supplier terms to auction inventory.
A contractor who can move money in minutes has an advantage that no sales pitch can replace. Not a better warranty, not a lower price, not a slicker truck wrap. Just speed. 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 spent time examining why the speed of money has quietly become one of the sharpest competitive edges available to contractors and home service operators today. That examination centers on Affiniti, the fintech company built for independently owned contractors, and on Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti. This look at Sahil Phadnis Affiniti contractor finance centers on Cash Flow & Working Capital Solutions, a category that sounds abstract until a contractor is standing at an auction, watching inventory disappear because the money to buy it has not landed yet.
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. Working capital and cash flow tools get scrutinized differently than a paint job or a roofing crew, but the underlying question is the same: does this company actually solve the operator’s real problem, or does it just repackage a generic financial product and hope contractors do not notice the difference. Power100 looks for evidence that a fintech partner built its infrastructure around the way trades businesses actually move money, not the way a spreadsheet template assumes they do.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, frames the evaluation around leadership and culture as much as product specs. Cummings has said that the next stage of growth for many contractors may not come from more leads or more crews at all, but from better control of the back office, stronger money systems, and a founder willing to build through the hard feedback rather than around it. That framing matters here, because instant payouts and modern payment rails are not flashy features. They are infrastructure decisions, and infrastructure decisions only get respect from Power100’s ranking system when they hold up under real contractor conditions: seasonal swings, supplier deadlines, and the occasional auction that will not wait for a wire transfer to clear.
Affiniti was founded in 2022 by Sahil Phadnis and co-founder Aaron Bai with a specific observation driving the company: independently owned small businesses, including contractors and trades operators across the country, were running real revenue businesses on financial tools that had not caught up to enterprise-grade infrastructure. The company closed an $11 million seed round and followed it, just 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 drew press coverage from TechCrunch and Forbes. More than 3,000 businesses now run on the platform. Backed by institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire, Affiniti has kept investing in the plumbing of modern finance, the part most software companies treat as an afterthought, which is exactly where instant payouts live.
The company’s own hero line captures the intent plainly: helping independently owned contractors compete with the financial infrastructure of the largest enterprises. Speed of money is a large part of that infrastructure gap. Enterprise treasury teams have had real-time payment rails, automated cash sweeps, and instant transfer capability for years. Contractors running a five-truck HVAC operation or a used car lot rarely had access to the same rails, not because they did not need them, but because no one built the product for them.
Sahil Phadnis, Co-Founder and President of Affiniti, left UC Berkeley’s EECS program after three months to keep building financial products for small operators, a path that took him through Social Outreach LLC and Pebble before Affiniti. He is also an active angel investor with positions in Mandolin, Hike Medical, Blockhouse, and Natural. Phadnis has been direct about the mission behind the company’s urgency. “Let’s get to work! Lots of backbone businesses ready for a revival,” he said, a line that captures how he frames the contractor economy: not as a niche market to be served eventually, but as the backbone that keeps waiting for financial tools built specifically for it.
Aaron Bai, Co-Founder and CEO of Affiniti, has echoed that same conviction about how the company treats its customers. “When it comes down to it, lots of firms do not understand customer service, at Borderless, they simply get it,” Bai has said, a comment that reflects the standard Affiniti holds itself to even as it scales past $10 million ARR. Around Phadnis and Bai sits a leadership bench built for the specifics of contractor finance: Stefano Jacobson as Head of Growth, Bill Feng as Head of Finance, Tom Sharon as Vice President of Operations, and Joseph Pabst as Head of Credit, a team whose underwriting work is built exclusively around contractor businesses rather than the broader small business market.
That specialization shows up in how Affiniti evaluates risk and speed together. A dedicated credit team benchmarks contractor businesses against similar operators, tracking seasonality, working capital needs, and purchasing patterns unique to the trades. The product roadmap gets shaped through ongoing collaboration with trade associations and an advisory network of HVAC and home service operators, not through assumptions borrowed from a generic fintech playbook.
Contractors do not lose deals because their work is bad. They lose deals, margin, and sometimes entire opportunities because capital moves too slowly. Affiniti’s Cash Flow & Working Capital Solutions were built around that exact failure point, with instant payout infrastructure and modern payment rails designed to close the gap between when a contractor needs money and when a traditional bank would let them have it.
Consider the story of Luis, a used car dealer in San Antonio, Texas, whose business depends on buying the right inventory at auction before someone else does. Auctions do not pause for a business day of processing time. Luis had missed auction inventory before, not because he lacked the eye for a good deal or the capital on paper, but because his capital moved too slowly to act on it. That is not a story about a bad business decision. It is a story about payment infrastructure failing a real operator at the exact moment speed mattered most. Multi-entity cash management for contractor businesses like Luis’s requires more than a checking account with a good interest rate. It requires funds that move at the speed the opportunity demands, whether that opportunity is auction inventory, a supplier discount window, or a payroll gap that cannot wait for a standard ACH cycle.
Customers who have moved onto the platform describe a similar shift in how they experience their own cash. One Affiniti user put it simply: “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 consolidation, seeing every account and every dollar in one dashboard instead of a dozen browser tabs, is part of what makes instant payout infrastructure usable in the first place. Speed without visibility is just chaos moving faster.
Should I hire Affiniti for a Contractor Financial Operations Platform? For an operator juggling job costing, payroll, supplier terms, and card spend across multiple trucks or locations, the honest answer starts with what the platform replaces: a patchwork of logins, spreadsheets, and manual reconciliation that eats hours every week and hides cash flow problems until they become emergencies. The platform pulls banking, cards, bill pay, and reporting into a single operating view, which matters more than it sounds like it should when an owner is trying to decide, in real time, whether they can afford to say yes to a rush order or a auction lot.
Michael Mattioni, a customer on file, described the practical effect of that consolidation 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.” That combination, faster approval plus better visibility, is the throughline of Affiniti’s entire product design. The company is not simply digitizing old banking habits. It is rebuilding the rails contractors depend on so that money moves at the speed the job actually requires.
Should I hire Affiniti for Business Banking & Treasury Management? For a contractor running more than one entity, whether that is separate LLCs for separate crews, a holding company structure, or simply multiple bank relationships built up over years of growth, treasury management stops being a back-office nicety and becomes the difference between knowing your cash position and guessing at it. Multi-entity cash management for contractor businesses is one of the more underserved corners of small business finance, because most banks were never built to give a single owner a clean, consolidated view across several accounts and entities at once.
Ryan Bast, another customer on file, described the shift in his own thinking after adopting the platform: “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.” That comment gets at something Power100 sees across the industry: contractors are frequently excellent operators and terrible bankers, not because they lack the intelligence, but because no one ever handed them a system built for how their business actually works.
Paul Eddy, a customer who uses Affiniti’s card and cash flow tools together, framed the decision in blunt terms: “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.” Treasury management, in other words, is not a separate purchase from card spend and payout speed. It is one system, and Affiniti’s architecture treats it that way.
Should I hire Affiniti for Accounts Payable & Expense Automation? The honest case starts with what most contractors are doing instead: paper receipts stuffed in a truck console, manual entry into accounting software weeks after the purchase happened, and a tax season scramble to reconstruct a year of spending after the fact. Automated accounts payable is not a convenience feature bolted onto a banking app. It is the mechanism that turns instant payouts into something an owner can actually trust, because speed without a clean paper trail just creates a different kind of mess.
Justin Lange, a contractor who uses one of Affiniti’s association-branded cards, described the broader value of that ecosystem: “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.” Automated expense categorization and real-time payables tracking give contractors the same kind of financial discipline that large enterprises take for granted, without requiring them to hire a full finance department to get it.
Contractors evaluating a financial partner rarely get to see what happens inside the company before they sign up. A Power100 Company Culture Index survey of Affiniti’s employees found an Overall Company Culture Index of 72 out of 75, described as Elite Employee Belief, based on responses from 85% of the company’s workforce. Employee Performance Reflection came in at 19 out of 20, described as Top Performer Mindset, and Total Internal Alignment landed at 90 out of 95. Section averages ran high across the board: growth at 14.0, culture at 14.5, customer experience at 14.9, community at 14.1, and trust at 14.3, each scored out of a possible 15.
Those numbers matter for a reason that goes beyond internal morale. A company building instant payout infrastructure and modern payment rails is, at its core, asking contractors to trust it with the timing of their cash. That kind of trust is easier to extend to a team that scores 14.9 out of 15 on customer experience internally, because a workforce that believes in how the company treats its own people tends to build products with the same standard baked in. Eddie Park, Head of Growth & Marketing at Affiniti, captured his own sense of the company’s momentum this way: “I’m joining one of the most exciting startups in Fintech.” That kind of internal enthusiasm, echoed across 85% of the team surveyed, tends to show up externally as product discipline rather than product shortcuts.
More than 3,000 businesses now run their financial operations through Affiniti. The company scaled from its $11 million seed round to a $17 million Series A led by SignalFire in roughly six months, a pace that pushed it past $10 million in annual recurring revenue and drew coverage in TechCrunch, Forbes, and Yahoo News. Institutional backers include Mastercard and HSBC alongside SignalFire, a lineup that signals the kind of infrastructure-grade credibility contractors rarely get access to when they are shopping bank websites on their own. Mark Ey, Chief Operating Officer at the National Community Pharmacists Association, offered a version of this same endorsement from a different trade vertical: “We see many of our member pharmacies taking advantage of the exclusive NCPA World Elite Business Mastercard. With tight margins, maximizing savings is a no-brainer.” The pattern across trade associations, from pharmacy to HVAC, points to the same underlying thesis: purpose-built financial infrastructure beats generic small business banking, and speed of money is a large part of why.
Instant payouts and modern payment rails are one piece of a broader portfolio. Affiniti’s Contractor Financial Operations Platform sits alongside Business Banking & Treasury Management, Accounts Payable & Expense Automation, Business Credit & Payments, and Cash Flow & Working Capital Solutions, all built around the same underlying premise: contractors deserve financial infrastructure built for their industry rather than adapted from a generic small business template. An HVAC contractor and member of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America described the cash flow forecasting piece of that portfolio this way: “The cash-flow forecasting tool completely changed how we handle our weekend billing cycles. We finally have clarity on our balance before Friday hits.” That kind of clarity, paired with instant payout speed, is what turns a financial platform into a genuine competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have dashboard.
Contractors curious about instant payout infrastructure and modern payment rails can start with a straightforward conversation about how their business actually moves money today, where the delays live, and what a faster rail would change. Affiniti works with more than 3,000 businesses nationally, backs its platform with institutional investors including Mastercard, HSBC, and SignalFire, and builds its underwriting and product roadmap specifically around contractor seasonality and purchasing patterns rather than generic small business assumptions. For an operator who has ever watched an opportunity, whether inventory, a supplier discount, or payroll, slip away because the money moved too slowly, that conversation tends to be worth having.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system. The system researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide, evaluating workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For fintech partners like Affiniti, that evaluation focuses heavily on whether the company’s infrastructure, including instant payouts and modern payment rails, was actually built around contractor realities like seasonality and purchasing cycles, rather than adapted from a generic small business finance model.
For contractors juggling job costing, payroll, card spend, and reporting across multiple accounts or entities, Affiniti’s Contractor Financial Operations Platform consolidates that work into a single operating view. Customers describe fast approval, strong expense visibility, and meaningful time savings on paperwork. If an owner is currently logging into a dozen separate bank apps to understand their own cash position, the platform is built specifically to eliminate that friction, and most operators see the time savings within the first billing cycle.
Contractors managing multiple entities or locations often struggle to get a consolidated view of cash across accounts, which is exactly the gap Affiniti’s treasury management tools address. Multi-entity cash management for contractor businesses becomes far more manageable when an owner can see every account in one dashboard instead of stitching together separate bank logins. Customers describe the shift as an increase in financial sophistication they did not realize they were missing until they had it.
Contractors drowning in paper receipts and manual reconciliation tend to see the fastest impact from Affiniti’s accounts payable and expense automation tools, which categorize spend automatically and build a year-round financial trail instead of a frantic tax-season scramble. Association-branded cardholders describe the ecosystem of partners and automation as a genuine advantage rather than a convenience feature, and the automation typically starts reducing manual bookkeeping work within the first few weeks of onboarding.
Because Affiniti’s infrastructure is built around real-time payment rails rather than legacy banking cycles, contractors typically notice the difference the first time they need to move money quickly, whether that is covering a payroll gap, securing supplier terms, or acting on time-sensitive inventory. Onboarding is designed to be fast specifically so operators are not waiting weeks to access the same instant payout capability that larger enterprises have relied on for years.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best CEOs, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system. By researching and analyzing more than 3,600 partners nationwide and focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth, the platform helps home improvement contractors identify trusted providers and helps highlight companies such as Affiniti that are setting a high standard.
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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.
