Kaaj, an agentic AI credit intelligence platform focused on simplifying small business lending, has announced raising $3.8 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with additional participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and other investors.
Established in 2024, Kaaj aims to make affordable capital more accessible to small businesses. By using agentic AI workflows that help lenders review complete loan packages and produce decision-ready assessments, the platform reduces operating costs and speeds up the credit evaluation process.
Utsav Shah, co-founder and CEO, Kaaj spent ten years at Uber and Cruise developing scalable AI-driven decision systems. Shivi Sharma, co-founder and President, has extensive experience in credit and fraud risk from roles at American Express, Uber, and Varo Bank.
The new funding will support the acceleration of product development and help the company expand within the $1.7 trillion U.S. small-business lending market and the $1.3 trillion equipment finance market.
Small business formation has reached historic highs in recent years, with more than 33 million small businesses operating across the country. Yet gaining access to capital still poses significant challenges. The Federal Reserve’s 2024 Small Business Credit Survey shows that around half of all applicants do not secure the full amount of financing they seek, leaving them underfunded during critical growth periods. One major reason is that, for many lenders, loans below $1 million are unprofitable due to manual, time-heavy underwriting processes.
Kaaj addresses this issue by deploying AI agents that automate the entire credit review workflow—from business verification and cash flow assessments to asset valuation, financial analysis, and risk evaluation. Tasks that traditionally require days of labor and extensive document review can be completed by Kaaj in under three minutes, producing analysis that integrates seamlessly with 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 reviewed more than $5 billion in loan applications, serving an expanding network of lenders and brokers that includes major industry players like Amur Equipment Finance, Quality Equipment Finance, and Fundr.
Kaaj supports both lenders and brokers, who collectively drive the majority of small business lending activity. For lenders, the platform enables efficient scaling without expanding headcount—allowing a team that currently handles 500 monthly applications to process 2,000 with no additional hiring. For brokers, the system offers intelligent matching features that direct deals to the best-suited financing partners. “Time kills deals in small business lending,” said CEO and co-founder Utsav Shah of Kaaj.
The platform also integrates easily with widely used CRM systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho, and others, enabling full deployment in under three weeks.
Beyond efficiency, Kaaj tackles a long-standing challenge in commercial lending: inconsistency in decision-making. Through behavioral studies conducted alongside credit underwriters, Kaaj found that lending decisions vary depending on factors like workload, time of day, and even the day of the week—issues that often disadvantage brokers and borrowers.
Kaaj ensures that every application receives the same thorough analysis, regardless of external conditions. This improves the quality and reliability of credit decisions while enhancing transparency and audit readiness—key requirements in today’s regulatory environment. Every data point, calculation, and insight within the platform is fully traceable, giving lenders complete visibility and control over their final decisions.
“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,” said Kanyi Maqubela, Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. “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.”
“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,” said Jake Gibson, Founding Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures.
