Roy Hefer expected a quick coffee. Instead, a “30 minutes” introduction with a newly appointed Lumenis CEO stretched “more than three hours,” he tells us, as they talked through her plan to transform a flat-growth, cash-bleeding medical device company and “ultimately take it public,” he tells us.
That conversation marked a shift from theory to ownership. After five years at McKinsey—based out of Tel Aviv, but spending “most of my time abroad,” he tells us—Hefer realized he was “a doer,” he tells us. He loved delivering “an amazing model” and “a very sophisticated framework,” he tells us, but not walking away before execution.
Read MoreAt Lumenis, execution became the point. A supply-chain initiative aimed to cut costs by 30%, he tells us; the team “managed to shave, save more than 40% cost,” he tells us. As the company prepared for a NASDAQ IPO in 2014, he tells us, his CFO pulled him closer—and Hefer had what he calls an “aha moment” where he “fell in love with finance,” he tells us, seeing how finance shapes decisions across fundraising, M&A, and expansion, he tells us.
Years later, after a second IPO chapter at Hippo Insurance in 2021, he tells us, Hefer chose the CFO path at Perk. There, late 2022 fundraising forced a fork: accept “highly dilutive” capital or pivot toward profitability to become “default alive,” he tells us. For Hefer, that’s the job: frame options early, build trust “brick by brick,” he tells us, and let the best decision make itself.
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CFOTL: Tell us about Perk and the opportunity you joined. What is the company all about?
Hefer: Perk is the fastest-growing AI-powered travel and spend solution, specifically designed for small and medium businesses. Our mission is very simple: we want to eliminate shadow work. Shadow work is all the work you were not hired to do—booking flights, changing reservations, coding invoices, tagging receipts, all the steps required to get reimbursed and maintain controls. Holistically, it’s a waste. You spend time and money on tasks outside your core competency, and it’s frankly demoralizing and draining. We started with travel and did that extremely well. Now we’re expanding into spend and, over time, into more pockets of shadow work.
We partnered with Forrester on a study that showed shadow work costs the global economy about $1.7 trillion, and employees spend more than seven hours a week on non-core tasks. When you remove that friction, you free people up to do their real jobs. That’s how we create value—and why customers love the product. We’ve crossed $300 million in annualized revenue and are growing close to 50% this year.
CFOTL: Can you walk us through the company’s capital structure and how Perk came to be?
Hefer: The company was founded in Barcelona by Avi Meir, our current CEO, along with two other co-founders. From a capital-structure perspective, it’s frankly boring—and I like boring. We’ve kept things very plain vanilla: no structured financing, nothing complex that could become dilutive later on.
CFOTL: Was the company bootstrapped, or how was it funded in the early days? What stage is Perk at today?
Hefer: We’re a pre-IPO company. To date, we’ve raised over $600 million in financing. Our most recent round was a Series E in January 2025, led by EIQ Growth and Atomico, with investors including General Catalyst, SoftBank, Sequoia, and others. We’re very well funded, primarily VC-backed, and on a strong trajectory.
Perk | www.perk.com | Boston