Turning real-time financial insight into an ecommerce advantage
Vertical: Ecommerce
Mercury products: IO, Bill Pay, Payroll, Quickbooks integration, Treasury
Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, Verve MarketOpens in new tab is building a smarter grocery platform for the 60% of Americans who live with dietary needs. For Andrés Ornelas Vargas, Founder & CEO, it’s personal. Fifteen years ago, an infection triggered a chronic condition that now makes a carefully tailored diet essential for him to feel his best. “Our goal is simple: help shoppers instantly discover and shop for foods that fit their health and lifestyle without guesswork or is this safe? moments.”
As a new platform, Ornelas’ team is earning trust one household at a time and laying the groundwork to support tens of thousands of families over the next year. That sort of growth, especially in a marketplace environment, brings complexity pretty early on.
The simplicity of Mercury’s interface, bringing payments, cards, and reconciliation into one place, saves us hours each week and makes assessing our finances fast and effortless.
New partners, creators, customers, and advertising keep operations in constant flux, with every decision touching cash timing, margins, and forecasting. Running a lean team while building the platform, Ornelas knew early on that they needed a finance stack that could keep pace with daily change.
Custom workflows keep partners moving
Verve Market organizes all payables through a single workflow so partner onboarding, invoices, and payouts happen without back and forth. Invoices funnel into one place, relevant details are automatically extracted, and large payments trigger custom approval controls.
New partners and creators submit payout information securely, keeping the platform running smoothly while protecting margins and preventing bottlenecks.
The result is speed with discipline:
- Over 90% of partner payments initiated same day
- Dozens of partners easily managed by a lean team
- Clear approval boundaries with view-only oversight from third-party vendors
Actionable visibility and clean forecasts
Accurate forecasting is one of the hardest parts of building an early-stage marketplace platform. Manual reconciliation piles up quickly, and stale numbers create guesswork around performance and campaign timing.
Ornelas’ team uses real-time balances to monitor cash daily, while their QuickBooks integration syncs transactions, bills, memos, and payments directly into their ledger. Rules and mappings clear duplicates and auto-categorize roughly 85% of transactions, equipping them with current, usable data minus the manual effort.
Bank feed and bill payments sync automatically, including memos and vendor tags for full traceability.
Up-to-date reconciliation means forecasts reflect reality, not numbers from weeks ago… an advantage when cash timing can affect runway and partner experience.
Spend controls that protect CAC
Ad spend is one of the biggest pressure points for many digital platforms. CAC shifts quickly, experiments multiply, and loose controls lead to budget leaks. To get ahead of any potential bottlenecks, executives issue IO cards to marketing team members by channel and campaign; Meta, Google, and influencer programs each get their own merchant-locked card with a capped spending limit.
When the team shifts strategy, they lock cards instantly or spin up new ones for fresh experiments. This autonomy gives marketing team members the freedom to test, while custom guardrails protect the business from overspend.
During a recent campaign, Mercury flagged a double payment on our cards page from one of our ad accounts, which let us catch and stop the charge — a simple control that saved real dollars.
Operational flexibility for growth and expansion
Cash cycles create natural tension: funds need to stay liquid to support partner payouts and day-to-day operations while still earning yield when possible. Verve Market aligns financial workflows with these rhythms through Bill Pay scheduling and approval rules. The team keeps operating funds at hand while investing idle cash in lower-risk, high-liquidity portfolios that earn yield and match their inventory cycles through Mercury Treasury
As they expand, Ornelas’s team can spin up new stores, regions, and entities on the platform without rebuilding financial infrastructure. Multi-entity support keeps everything under one login, and international suppliers fit into that same workflow. So when the time comes, they’re able to send USD wires to overseas vendors from a single dashboard, keeping global operations moving.
Moving fast when it matters most
Speed is essential for a growing platform — especially when it comes to finding and fixing mission-critical issues that impact customer acquisition and future margins. Recently, while building a high-impact ad campaign on a tight deadline, the team had to submit customized banking docs as a final step. ”Mercury sent us the letter in under five minutes, which let us launch in time for a key event,” said Ornelas. That campaign ultimately drove a surge in new customer acquisition.
Verve Market is built on an operational foundation geared for the future: fast to adjust, clear to navigate, and responsive to new partners, products, and campaigns. For Ornelas and his team, this means:
- More than 90% of vendor payments are sent the same day
- ~85% of transactions are auto-categorized
- Month-end close and reconciliation in minutes, not hours
- Clean approval structures scale as new vendors are onboarded
- Cash visibility for accurate forecasting
With this in place, the team can focus on what matters — scaling responsibly and becoming the go-to destination for households who want food that “simply fits.”
