We partner with cities to make their local businesses stronger.

Before Lunch, we built and ran PlayVS — the official esports platform for U.S. middle and high schools. To do that, we sold into school districts across the country. We loved the work. We loved the customer. But we kept hitting the same wall: school districts pay slowly. Net 60, net 90, sometimes longer. Every quarter, we and our partners watched small vendors of every shape — coaches, AV providers, software platforms, equipment suppliers — struggle through the cash-flow gap that government payment cycles create.

The problem is not that cities and school districts are bad customers. They are some of the best customers a small business can have: stable, repeat, predictable. The problem is that the gap between “invoice approved” and “invoice paid” is exactly the gap that breaks small businesses, and especially the small businesses cities most want to support.

Lunch is the program we wished existed when we were the vendor. Cities don’t change anything about how they pay. Vendors get the option to be paid early on the invoices they choose. The same dollars the city was going to pay anyway start working in the local economy weeks earlier — and along the way, every invoice paid through Lunch builds the vendor’s commercial credit profile, so the local business that took on its first city contract this year qualifies for a bigger one next year.