Claurelle Rakipovic is chief executive of Pipe, the company that works with software platforms to offer working capital to the small businesses that use them. She spent six years at Amazon building its small business lending product from the ground up, joined Pipe as chief product officer, and took over as chief executive in December 2025.
An Economist Who Started a Company
She studied finance and economics at the University of Toronto and began her career as an economics researcher. She then founded her own business, Engage Media, before moving into product work at BlackBerry. Later she earned an MBA at INSEAD.
Building Lending at Amazon
At Amazon she launched and scaled the company's lending and business-to-business payments businesses around the world. Amazon's loans were offered to sellers inside the marketplace they already used, which is the same idea Pipe sells to other platforms today. She then became a vice president of product at Capital Group, one of the world's largest asset managers.
From Product Chief to Chief Executive
She joined Pipe as chief product officer and spent a year reshaping its product into capital that a software platform can embed for its own customers, with plans to grow it into a wider operating system for small businesses. In December 2025 the board made her chief executive, succeeding Luke Voiles as the company focused on profitability, operating efficiency and its core products. Pipe more than doubled the volume of financing it originated in 2025, and it works with partners in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
She has spent most of two decades on one idea: that the best place to lend to a small business is inside the software it already runs on. She built it once for a single marketplace at Amazon. At Pipe she is building it for everyone else's.
