Kaaj, an agentic AI credit intelligence platform that simplifies small business lending, today announced it has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and others.
Founded in 2024, Kaaj’s mission is to expand access to affordable capital for all small businesses. Using agentic AI workflows to help lenders analyze end-to-end loan packages and create decision-ready analysis for small business lending, Kaaj reduces lender costs and accelerates decision-making.
Kaaj’s founding team combines deep AI expertise and risk experience. Utsav Shah, co-founder and CEO, spent a decade at Uber and Cruise, building AI-powered decision-making systems at scale. Shivi Sharma, co-founder and President, is an expert in credit and fraud risk, formerly of American Express, Uber, and Varo Bank.
The capital will accelerate product development and expand Kaaj’s reach across the $1.7 trillion U.S. small-business lending market and the $1.3 trillion equipment finance market.
A Unique Market Opportunity: Expanding Access to Affordable Capital for Undercapitalized Small Businesses Across the U.S.
Small business formation has surged to record levels over the past two years, with U.S. small businesses now numbering more than 33 million. However, access to capital remains a critical challenge.
According to the Federal Reserve 2024 Small Business Credit Survey, approximately 50% of small business loan applicants fail to receive the full amount of capital they need, leaving businesses undercapitalized at crucial growth stages. A major reason for this gap is that for most lenders, loans under $1m are not profitable using current manual, time-intensive underwriting approaches.
To solve this, Kaaj’s platform deploys AI agents that work together to automate the entire credit analysis process, from business verification and cash flow analysis to asset valuation, financial analysis, and risk assessment. What traditionally takes underwriters days of manual work across thousands of documents, Kaaj completes the work in under three minutes, delivering decision-ready analysis that integrates seamlessly into existing loan origination systems.
“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,” said Shivi Sharma, President and co-founder of Kaaj. “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 and has a growing customer base of lenders and brokers with industry-leading companies like Amur Equipment Finance, Quality Equipment Finance, and Fundr.
Addressing Both Sides of the Small Business Lending Ecosystem
Kaaj serves both lenders and brokers, who together represent the vast majority of small business financing activity. For lenders, the platform enables profitable scaling without proportional headcount growth, allowing a team processing 500 applications monthly to handle 2,000 applications with the same staff. For brokers, Kaaj adds intelligent lender matching capabilities, routing deals to the most appropriate financing sources.
“Time kills deals in small business lending,” said CEO and co-founder Utsav Shah. “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.”
By integrating with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho, and more, Kaaj goes live in as little as three weeks.
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