San Francisco-based Kaaj, an agentic AI credit intelligence platform, announced it has raised $3.8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and others, to advance the company’s mission of expanding access to affordable capital for small businesses.
Kaaj, founded in 2024, aims to simplify small business lending by deploying agentic AI workflows. Its platform helps lenders analyze end-to-end loan packages, generating decision-ready analysis for small business lending. This approach is designed to reduce lender costs and accelerate decision-making processes.
The company’s founding team brings together expertise in AI and risk management. Co-founder and CEO Utsav Shah previously spent a decade at Uber and Cruise, where he built AI-powered decision-making systems at scale. Shivi Sharma, co-founder and President, is an expert in credit and fraud risk, having held roles at American Express, Uber, and Varo Bank.
The newly secured capital will be used to accelerate product development and expand Kaaj’s market presence. The company targets the $1.7 trillion U.
S. small-business lending market and the $1.3 trillion equipment finance market.
The U.
S. small business sector has seen record formation, with over 33 million businesses. However, access to capital remains a significant challenge, as approximately 50% of small business loan applicants do not receive the full amount of capital requested, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2024 Small Business Credit Survey. A primary reason for this gap is that loans under $1 million are often unprofitable for most lenders due to time-intensive manual underwriting processes.
Kaaj’s platform addresses this by deploying AI agents that automate the entire credit analysis process. This includes business verification, cash flow analysis, asset valuation, financial analysis, and risk assessment. What traditionally takes underwriters days of manual work across numerous documents, Kaaj completes in under three minutes, delivering analysis that integrates with existing loan origination systems.
Shivi Sharma, President and co-founder of Kaaj, highlighted the economic challenge: “Lenders face a fundamental profitability problem: it takes the same amount of time and resources to underwrite a $100,000 loan as it does a $5 million loan.” Sharma added, “This forces lenders to prioritize larger loans, leaving millions of small businesses without access to the capital they need to operate and grow. Kaaj’s platform doesn’t just speed things up. It fundamentally changes the economics of small business lending, making smaller loans profitable for lenders while improving the borrower experience.”The platform has already processed over $5 billion in loan applications. Kaaj reports a growing customer base, including industry participants such as Amur Equipment Finance, Quality Equipment Finance, and Fundr.
Kaaj serves both lenders and brokers, who collectively facilitate a significant portion of small business financing activity. For lenders, the platform enables profitable scaling without proportional headcount growth, potentially allowing a team handling 500 applications monthly to manage 2,000 with the same staff. For brokers, Kaaj incorporates intelligent lender matching capabilities, directing deals to appropriate financing sources.
Utsav Shah, CEO and co-founder, emphasized the role of speed: “Time kills deals in small business lending. When multiple lenders compete for the same quality borrowers, speed determines winners. Faster, more consistent decisions with clear data help brokers reduce administration time and focus on delivering bespoke advice and guidance for small businesses. For lenders, Kaaj speeds up the response time to minutes instead of days, demonstrably improving their approval-to-funding ratios so they don’t lose quality deals to competitors.”Kaaj integrates with popular CRM systems, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, and Zoho, allowing for implementation in as little as three weeks.
Beyond speed, Kaaj addresses inconsistency in commercial lending decisions. Behavioral studies have shown that underwriting decisions can vary based on factors like time of day, workload, or day of the week. Kaaj aims to provide consistent, comprehensive due diligence for every deal, improving decision quality and enhancing transparency and audit-readiness, which are critical in the current regulatory environment.
The platform’s architecture ensures transparency, with every data point, calculation, and insight fully traceable and verifiable. This allows lenders to demonstrate clear audit trails for regulators while maintaining full control over final lending decisions.
Kanyi Maqubela, Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures, commented on the investment: “Small business lending has long struggled with a fundamental economics problem, the cost to underwrite smaller loans hasn’t matched the returns, leaving millions of businesses underserved. Kaaj is solving this by fundamentally changing the unit economics of SMB lending through intelligent automation. The platform doesn’t just incrementally improve efficiency; it unlocks an entirely new category of profitable lending that was previously inaccessible.”Jake Gibson, Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, stated: “We’re backing a team with the rare combination of deep AI expertise and domain knowledge in credit risk to build the infrastructure that will power the next generation of small business finance.” Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder & General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, added: “What impressed us most was Kaaj’s approach to building transparent, audit-ready AI that enhances rather than replaces human judgment. In an industry where consistency and compliance are paramount, this is exactly the kind of infrastructure innovation that expands access to financial services for underserved communities.”
