Our $3.8M Seed round, led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures, Karman Ventures, Pythia Ventures, Coughdrop Capital, and our awesome angels, is a milestone to accelerate our mission of expanding access to capital for small businesses through our credit intelligence platform for lenders and brokers.
We’re so grateful for the support of Kanyi Maqubela and Steve Jang at Kindred, Jake Gibson and Sheel Mohnot at BTV, and our awesome angels including Soups Ranjan (CEO, Sardine AI), Rahul Ramesh (CCO Brex), Remy Carole (COO, TreasuryPrime), Sip Jiyane (CAO, Affirm), Steven Ma, Adam Jackson (CEO, Braintrust Network), Aadik Shekhar, Trupti Natu, and all other angels. Thank you for believing in us!
Funding Round at a Glance
- $3.8 million raised to expand access to capital for small businesses.
- Led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and others.
The capital will accelerate product development and scale operations.
It’s a Win-Win: Kaaj Unlocks Essential Capital For Small Businesses and Makes Small Loans Profitable For Lenders
Small businesses are the engine propelling the U.S. Economy. Access to capital is the fuel that drives this engine. According to the US Treasury Department, the small business loan market in the United States was valued at over $1.4 trillion in January 2025. New small business formation has surged by 50% over the past five years, with a record 430,000 new business applications each month in 2024. Small businesses are responsible for creating 70% of net new jobs.
However, both small business borrowers and the nation’s lenders face serious pain points when it comes to getting capital where it needs to be when it’s needed.
Half of all small business loan applicants fail to raise the full amount of capital they need. Being undercapitalized at crucial points in their growth journey can be a death sentence for small businesses. However current approaches to underwriting and decision-making are manual and time-intensive. Underwriting a $100,000 loan and a $5 million loan take the same amount of time and money. This makes small loans (under $1 million) unprofitable for lenders. The problem cuts both ways; eroding lender profits and limiting access to capital for the 30+ million small businesses across the U.S.
We are here to fix this.
Using agentic AI workflows, we help lenders convert raw and messy loan packages into decision-ready analysis with complete financial profile and holistic risk assessment within minutes. This helps sales, operations, and credit teams cut manual tedious tasks by 90%, accelerate decision making, improve consistency, and win more deals.
What traditionally takes underwriters days of manual work across thousands of documents, Kaaj completes in under three minutes, delivering decision-ready analysis that integrates seamlessly into existing loan origination systems.
For brokers, we help build comprehensive loan packages and automatically match deals to the most suitable financing sources to increase conversion and speed up funding.
Voices From the Funding Round
“Time kills deals in small business lending. 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,” said Kaaj’s CEO and co-founder Utsav Shah.
“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,” said Kanyi Maqubela, Managing Partner, Kindred Ventures.
The Road Ahead
Kaaj’s mixture of deep AI expertise and domain knowledge in credit and fraud risk management will be critical as we build transparent, audit-ready AI that enhances rather than replaces human judgment.
Our AI agents not only deliver speed, but also consistency in the underwriter decision-making process. Underwriter decision-making varies dramatically according to a wide array of factors, ranging from the time of day to current workload. This inconsistency frustrates both brokers and borrowers. Every deal Kaaj analyzes receives the same comprehensive due diligence, regardless of external factors. This consistency improves decision quality while making the entire process more transparent and audit-ready, critical factors in an industry where consistency and compliance are paramount.
We’ve already assessed over $5B+ in loan originations and have a growing customer base with industry-leading companies like Amur Equipment Finance, Quality Equipment Finance, Machinery Partner Capital, Fundr, and many more. Let’s build the future of lending together. . By integrating with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho, and more, our product can go live in as little as three weeks.
Kaaj’s underwriting engine has already been successfully embedded end-to-end in the offerings of leading industrial equipment marketplace Machinery Partner, a partnership that embeds real-time credit intelligence directly into heavy-equipment checkout flows.
Going forward, Kaaj will leverage its deep expertise, agentic AI tools, and $3.8 million in seed funding to develop new products that support both small businesses and lenders at a critical moment for the U.S. economy. We’re fundamentally changing the economics of small business lending, making smaller loans profitable for lenders while improving the borrower experience, and this is just the beginning.
Curious about how AI can help you accelerate small business lending and equipment financing? Book a demo with us.
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