Lilac Bar David co-founded Lili, a New York banking app built for freelancers and small businesses, and leads it as chief executive. She has spent about two decades in banking and payments, and Lili is her second attempt at building a bank from scratch.
Two Decades in Banking
Before Lili, she co-founded Pepper, a mobile-only digital bank in Israel. Pepper gave her firsthand experience of launching a digital bank, and for her next company she wanted a narrower, underserved segment.
She and co-founder Liran Zelkha went looking for a group of customers that was big, growing, and poorly served. In her telling, they found it where the online economy met the freelance economy: people who fall somewhere between a consumer and a small business, with tax, expense, and invoicing problems that neither kind of bank solved well.
A Bank for the Self-Employed
They launched Lili in 2018 as a bank account with the bookkeeping built in. The app sorts expenses, sets money aside for taxes each time a payment arrives, and produces the reports a freelancer needs at tax time. The pandemic sped everything up. Many people picked up side work or went fully independent, and many of them had no idea what running a business involved. Lili passed 200,000 users in 2021 and raised fresh funding to keep building.
Her strategy was to solve one problem at a time: taxes and expenses first, then getting paid through invoices, then credit. Each new feature was meant to save a freelancer time and money, not to add a product for its own sake.
Growing Up With Its Customers
By 2026 many of Lili’s early freelancers had hired help. In January the company repositioned to serve small businesses with several employees, offering free online business banking alongside paid plans with more tools. Later in the year it added credit lines through lending partners.
The shift follows the same logic she used at the start. Lili still targets the owner who wants banking and back-office work handled in one app; the difference is that the owner now has a payroll to meet as well as a tax bill to save for.
