Caleb Avery founded Tilled, a Boulder company that lets software platforms offer card and ACH payments under their own brand, and is its chief executive. He has worked in payments since he was 19.
Selling Terminals Door to Door
His career began while he was a college sophomore. He went door to door selling payment processing to small business owners, an unusual job for a 19-year-old, and found he liked it. He scaled that first independent sales organization and learned how merchant accounts, processors, and acquiring banks fit together from the ground up.
Between that business and Tilled, he did angel investing and consulted for vertical software companies. That gave him a view into the problems those companies faced with payments, and into the money they were leaving on the table.
The Problem in Boulder
After he moved to Boulder, he met founders and finance chiefs across the local startup scene. Companies of every size, from first-year startups to firms moving billions of dollars, were sending payments through Stripe, Square, or Braintree and earning nothing from the flow. Becoming a payment facilitator themselves would let them share in that revenue, but it meant registration, underwriting, and risk work beyond the reach of most software teams.
He founded Tilled in 2019 to close that gap with PayFac-as-a-Service: Tilled carries the registration and risk, while the software company offers payments under its own name and shares in the economics. He has talked about cutting integration times from six months to nine days.
Growing the Partner Channel
Tilled now works with vertical software companies, marketplaces, and sales organizations. In October 2026 it raised more than $10 million after five-fold growth in its enterprise channel and launched Portfolio Autopilot, an AI tool that finds and screens merchants for partners.
The tool is a modern version of how Avery started. Where he once walked into shops to sign merchants, Tilled now uses software to do that prospecting for the platforms it serves.
