In this episode, host Timothy Li (CEO, LendAPI) sits down with Utsav, founder and CEO of Kaaj, to talk about how AI is helping banks, credit unions, and independent finance companies underwrite small business and equipment loans in minutes instead of days.
Utsav spent a decade in data science and machine learning at Snapdeal, Uber, and Cruise, where he built systems making high-stakes decisions in milliseconds. He co-founded Kaaj with his wife, Shivi, a fintech fraud and credit risk veteran. Today, more than $20 billion in deals flow through the platform each year. The conversation covers the Delhi-to-San Francisco journey, becoming a first-time dad five weeks ago, and why the next generation of small business owners won’t wait months for an SBA loan.
What You’ll Learn:
Why a $50K loan takes lenders as long to underwrite as a $5M loan, and why that makes small deals “unprofitable”
How Kaaj cut underwriting turnaround at some lenders from 8-10 business hours to about 20 minutes
How AI reads bank statement PDFs, tax returns, and screenshots, so a trucker can send a photo and a note from the road
What 200+ parameters per deal mean: financials, fraud, owner credit, and equipment data analyzed in one pass
Why traditional lenders, with a lower cost of capital, can beat fintechs on rate if they modernize
Why equipment finance is hard to automate: the business, owner, asset, and location all need underwriting
Why self-driving car simulations inspired Kaaj’s approach to training on edge cases, and why veteran underwriters’ gut instinct still matters
Why the average small business owner is getting younger, and what that means for lender expectations
About Kaaj
Kaaj is an AI underwriting and workflow platform for small business and equipment lenders, helping banks, credit unions, and independent finance companies analyze deals, flag risk, and make faster decisions. Kaaj is a partner on the LendAPI Marketplace.
Learn more: https://www.kaaj.ai
Explore the LendAPI Partners: https://www.lendapi.com/marketplace/kaaj
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