Say hello to Lemon 👋

At Lemon, we're on a mission to help finance brokers with modern AI tools.

The commercial finance broker model is broken

For decades, commercial finance brokers and deal teams have scaled the same way: More analysts. More hours. More headcount. That model is broken. It's slow, expensive, and impossible to scale in today's market.

We're building Lemon because getting business financing doesn't need to work this way anymore.

Lemon is the new operating system for intermediaries, powered by AI agents

Our agents live where brokers already work, in WhatsApp, Email & HubSpot. They take care of the heavy lifting, all from a simple conversation.

From a text or a voice note, Lemon agents get to work on:

Comprehensive research on your client (saving you 1 hour per deal of desktop research)
Analysing company financial data in minutes (instead of days of manual spreadsheet work)
Communicating, collecting and verifying documents automatically (cutting administrative time by ~70%)
Finding the right lenders across a massive, fragmented £5T+ lending market
Creating loan proposals that help you close more deals quicker without hiring more people

This is where the industry is heading: AI and humans working in harmony

We've spent the past year looking at $80m+ of financing opportunities, and as a team, we've worked on over $5bn of transactions. We've seen first-hand how painful these manual processes can be and how transformative it will be to change them.

The work only humans can do: winning trust, building relationships, closing deals, finally becomes the work you can actually spend time on.

And maybe even a bit more time on the golf course. ⛳️

Building Lemon

Our story so far

From startup idea to growing fintech platform

Lemon was started in 2023 in Manchester by cofounders Matt Bird and James Lewis. Now headquartered in London, we're building something special.

The backstory

We launched Lemon v1 in 2023. The goal was to connect traditional lenders to SaaS financing.

We spent the past 12-14 months testing our assumptions that software companies want to get paid upfront, buyers want to pay over time, and lenders want access to software financing deals. On paper, all of these things are true. Our product is the infrastructure that makes it all happen.

But in practice, we uncovered a reality that we had overlooked. Software isn't always the answer. Not everything has to be technology-driven.

We had $50M+ company founders texting us directly. CFOs were calling to ask if we knew lenders for their customers. They weren't using our software, they were using us.

Customers valued our experience and our network over the technology that we'd built. They trusted us to get financing in place for them.

But we realised that you can't scale trust. When you are the trust layer, you become the bottleneck. We were our own bottleneck. We couldn't get out of the manual work to move the needle.

It's why today we're building for the people who are the trust layer: the intermediaries, brokers, and dealmakers who are trusted to move trillions in capital but are still operating at half speed, through no fault of their own.

It turns out the answer isn't replacing the humans in finance. It's giving them the ability to do more.

The team

Matt Bird
• Co-Founder / CEO
Serial entrepreneur in the recurring payments space. Third time founder.
James Lewis
• Co-Founder / CPO
Experienced in building and scaling B2B technology businesses.
Matt Parke
• CTO
Seasoned hands-on engineer who has led teams and worked across many sectors including financial services.
Shubhanga Prasad
• Lending Operations
Has built digital products in the banking, fintech & enterprise SaaS space.
Matt Baker
• Financial partnerships USA