About Kaaj
Small business underwriting is not a linear checklist. It is a messy, exception-heavy workflow across documents, bank statements, business verification, fraud signals, credit policy, and human judgment.
We started Kaaj because lenders should not need to choose between speed and discipline. The best credit teams already know what good judgment looks like. Our job is to give that judgment leverage.
Founder's Letter
Small business lending does not need another document extractor. It needs an intelligence layer that remembers why decisions were made.
Utsav Shah
Shivi SharmaFounder's Letter
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. That reality leaves too many small businesses waiting, reworking documents, or missing access to capital entirely.
Kaaj was built for the operators inside that pressure. We believe AI should not hide judgment or replace credit teams. It should gather evidence, preserve reasoning, explain exceptions, and learn from every package so institutional knowledge compounds instead of resetting with each deal.
Our mission is to expand access to affordable capital by changing the economics of small business lending, one decision-ready package at a time.
Origin
After years in credit, fraud, and risk, we kept seeing the same problem: the most important work in underwriting was happening outside the system of record.
The CRM knew the status. The LOS stored the fields. But the reasoning lived in spreadsheets, notes, Slack and Teams threads, and people's heads: why a deposit was excluded, why a mismatch was accepted, why an exception made sense.
Kaaj was created to make credit reasoning structured, visible, and reusable.
Before Kaaj
With Kaaj
Founders
Kaaj is founded by people who have lived the operating constraints behind high-volume decisions: messy inputs, tight timelines, compliance expectations, and the need for clear judgment.
Co-founder and CEO
Spent a decade at Uber and Cruise building AI-powered decision-making systems at scale.
Utsav started Kaaj to bring the same level of operational rigor, persistent context, and compounding intelligence to lending decisions that modern risk teams expect in high-scale systems.
LinkedInCo-founder and President
Credit and fraud risk operator with experience across American Express, Uber, and Varo Bank.
Shivi has seen how much high-stakes credit judgment happens outside the system of record. Kaaj is built to make that judgment structured, visible, and reusable.
LinkedInThe Team
Our team spends time with lending teams, brokers, industry groups, and operators so the product reflects real workflows instead of clean-room diagrams.
Backed By
Kaaj raised seed funding to expand access to capital for small businesses and accelerate its agentic AI credit intelligence platform for lenders, brokers, and equipment finance teams.
Read the announcementInvestors
"Time kills deals in small business lending. Faster, more consistent decisions with clear data help brokers and lenders win quality deals."Utsav Shah, Co-founder and CEO
Our Beliefs
We build for shared inboxes, messy PDFs, mismatched names, incomplete packages, urgent broker emails, and exceptions.
Every extraction, classification, recommendation, and exception should come with evidence a credit team can inspect.
Kaaj prepares the analysis, preserves the evidence, and drafts the memo. Credit teams make the decision.
Every deal should make the next one smarter by preserving reasoning, exceptions, and policy context.
Who We Serve
Kaaj is shaped by equipment finance companies, SMB lenders, brokers, private credit teams, and community-focused institutions. The common thread is high-volume, document-heavy credit workflows where speed, consistency, and traceability matter.
“Kaaj's AI agents have become a force multiplier for our operations, streamlining intake and credit workflows, eliminating manual data entry, and empowering our team to respond to partners faster and more consistently. The result: a sharper, more reliable experience at every touchpoint”
SVP Technology, Amur
Trusted by lending teams
Trust & Security
Kaaj handles sensitive borrower and lender information, so security, access control, auditability, and traceability are product requirements, not afterthoughts.
View security overviewBook a demo with the team building the intelligence layer for small business credit decisions.
