AI credit underwriting company AbleCredit has raised $1.25 million in seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital (VC) firm Merak Ventures. Venture Catalysts and Helios Holdings (Suraj Nalin) also participated in the round. The start-up will leverage the investment to scale its AI operations, along with business growth and expansion.

Founded by Utkarsh Apoorva, Harshad Saykhedkar, Ashwini Prabhu and Anubhab Bandyopadhyay, AbleCredit, is developing generative AI models with voice, vision, and language capabilities to assist the credit team and generate comprehensive credit reports, while adhering to the credit policy and guidelines. According to the start-up, this model has helped increase underwriting speed by over 20 times and reduce underwriting costs by enhancing credit process throughput by 12 times.

Credit gap

Utkarsh Apoorva, Cofounder and CEO of AbleCredit, said, “Emerging economies are facing a significant credit gap in the MSME sector, leading to unemployment and economic barriers. At AbleCredit, our AI system leverages voice, vision, and language capabilities to extend credit analysis into traditionally overlooked sectors. This approach enables us to serve a wide range of industries by analysing alternative data sources to produce comprehensive credit assessments.”

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AbleCredit currently focuses on both secured and unsecured segments. By utilising advances in artificial intelligence, the start-up aims to provide small businesses with loans in under a minute and targets processing one million loan applications over the course of the next 12 months.

Manu Rikhye, Partner at Merak Ventures, said, “Credit underwriting, historically a time-consuming process in loan disbursement, is ripe for transformation with recent advancements in AI. AbleCredit’s innovative tools promise unprecedented speed and efficiency in underwriting, empowering companies to make decisions faster and more effectively. At Merak Ventures, we are committed to championing such impactful solutions for real-world challenges.”

(Inputs by bl intern Vidushi Nautiyal)