Instacart’s Head of Product for Payments, Ofek Lavian, has joined Forage as the fintech startup’s COO.
In his new role, Lavian will drive the company’s day-to-day operations as it creates a product that allows grocers and other merchants to accept Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) payments online. He will also help lead and scale Forage’s product, operations and partnerships teams.
“We are beyond excited for him to join our executive team and accelerate our timeline to help grocers and merchants of all sizes accept EBT payments online,” Forage co-founder and CEO Justin Intal said in a press release. “Ofek is joining us at a very critical period in Forage’s growth, and his expertise in the payments space from working at tech leaders like Instacart and Uber will help fast track our product development and partnership plans.”
Lavian brings precisely the background Forage needs, as he has a history of working on payments at startups throughout Silicon Valley. Before building Instacart’s payments functions, he was the third product hire at Sonder, where he led the Product and Partnership teams. Lavian was also a Product Manager for Payments at Uber and helped launch the company’s tipping feature.
In his press release announcing Lavian’s hire, Intal called Lavian “one of the most knowledgeable payments experts in Silicon Valley” and added, “what he accomplished in two years at Instacart transformed the entire payments side of their business.”
At Instacart, Lavian saw the pain points that needed to be solved and told TechCrunch that it took the grocery delivery giant nine months to integrate with a legacy payments processor and gain the ability to accept EBT payments. Even after the integration, Instacart still faced reliability issues, meaning users paying through programs like SNAP weren’t always able to complete their transactions.
Lavian described Forage’s early position as similar to that of Stripe. He stated, “Stripe was not the first place on the internet that accepted credit and debit card payments. There were other ways to do it before. However, Stripe just made it incredibly easy, reliable and had best in class technology, and that’s exactly what Forage is trying to do for government-funded payments.”
Should Forage revolutionize EBT processing, it could stand to land a sizable chunk of the estimated $3.7 trillion worth of social benefit programs the U.S. government distributes through specialized payment networks each year.
