Worth AI’s $10B Vision Is Fixing Business Credit and Changing SMB Financing Forever

For small business owners, accessing capital has long been fraught with challenges, from lengthy approval processes to inconsistent credit assessments. Suneera Madhani, co-founder of Stax Payments, experienced these inefficiencies firsthand while building Stax into a billion-dollar company. The experience illuminated a fundamental issue in small business financing: a fractured and outdated system for assessing creditworthiness.

Traditional business credit assessments relied heavily on manual processes and static data, leaving them both time-consuming and inaccurate. Stax’s own operations were a testament to this inefficiency. With 40 human underwriters comprising 10% of the workforce, evaluating a client’s creditworthiness took an average of 17 days. Despite this significant investment in resources, the assessments often relied on data that quickly became obsolete as business conditions evolved.

“This is why we see risk losses. That entire system was something that was broken,” Madhani explained. “As a consumer, I can go today and buy a car if I want to. They’ll know my risk based on my credit score. There is standardization around my personal financial health, based on a personal credit score. We have no standardization on the business credit side.”

The Birth of Worth AI

The frustration Madhani encountered became the spark for her next venture: Worth AI, co-founded with her brother and business partner, Sal Rehmetullah. Worth AI aims to address the glaring inconsistencies in the small business credit ecosystem by introducing an AI-driven, transparent, and standardized approach to financial profiling.

“We are launching Worth AI because there is a desperate need for data transparency and accurate financial profiling of businesses,” Madhani said. “The credit score has been standardized from a consumer lens, but the business credit score has not—and every financial institution, lender, bank, and fintech is assessing SMBs uniquely, with outdated human decisions and risk engines causing biases in decision-making and massive risk of loss.”

The timing for Worth AI’s launch could not have been better. In the wake of COVID-19, businesses worldwide accelerated their digital transformation efforts, making financial data more accessible than ever. APIs connected to accounting software, payroll systems, and tax filings now allow companies like Worth AI to analyze thousands of traditional and non-traditional data points.

This wealth of information is the foundation for WorthScore™, the company’s proprietary predictive business value score. WorthScore™ evaluates a business’s overall financial health, providing an instant and holistic assessment of creditworthiness. This AI-powered solution eliminates the need for labor-intensive underwriting processes while empowering small business owners to improve their financial positions proactively.

At the heart of Worth AI’s platform lies a suite of features designed to streamline credit assessments and improve outcomes for both lenders and small businesses. Its AI-enabled underwriting desk facilitates knowledge management for risk analysts, consolidating applicant activities, verification statuses, and other critical data in one centralized dashboard. The platform also offers real-time monitoring of in-progress applications, enabling underwriters to identify and address bottlenecks before they escalate.

“Worth’s innovative approach transforms a historically complex and time-consuming underwriting process into a seamless and intuitive experience,” said Rehmetullah. “The Worth AI platform enhances the efficiency of financial service providers, creates equal access to capital for small businesses, and fosters economic growth for all.”

Worth AI’s vision has attracted a diverse group of mission-aligned investors. Its most recent funding round included contributions from Florida Funders, Deep Work Capital, Ingeborg, and the Florida Opportunity Fund. The company has raised over eight figures in pre-seed funding, with plans to secure additional capital from strategic partners.

For Madhani, this funding strategy was deeply personal. As a minority woman founder, she encountered significant challenges raising venture capital for Stax. With Worth AI, she prioritized assembling a diverse cap table that reflected the company’s mission of fostering equity in small business financing.

“After scaling our first business to a billion-dollar company, it was essential to bring on a diverse cap table—something that aligns deeply with Worth’s mission to create an equitable financial future for small businesses,” said Madhani. “I’m proud to have a mission-centered, values-aligned group of investors at the table who are committed to driving this vision forward and making a meaningful impact across the industry.”

Executing such an ambitious vision requires a robust leadership team, and Worth AI has assembled an impressive roster of executives from companies like Visa, Dun & Bradstreet, American Express, and Google. The company’s board of advisors is equally distinguished, featuring notable names such as Asif Ramji, former Chief Product Officer at Worldpay, who serves as Chairman of the Board; Melinda McBride, Senior Vice President of Partnerships at Equifax; and Sonali Sambhus, former Senior Vice President at Block Inc.

“Worth AI’s innovative solution unlocks new avenues for growth for financial service providers and changes the way small business owners can understand and improve their own credit worth,” said Ramji.

Strategic Partnership with Equifax

Worth AI’s partnership with Equifax further solidifies its position as a transformative player in small business financing. By integrating Equifax’s commercial data solutions, the platform provides lenders with comprehensive insights into both business credit information and consumer reports on business principals, all while complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

“Together, the innovative solutions from Worth AI and industry-leading differentiated commercial data from Equifax will help facilitate a more transparent underwriting process to improve the funding climate for small businesses, helping them to potentially expand their footprint and positively impact their local economies,” said McBride.

Early adopters of Worth AI’s platform are already reporting significant improvements. Shahin Jahromi, CPO of Aurora Payments, highlighted the platform’s efficiency: “With Worth’s zero-touch onboarding, Aurora can now onboard merchants directly and without handholding. Worth’s technology has allowed us to consolidate and significantly simplify our previously cumbersome onboarding workflow while adding real-time validation, reducing incomplete and incorrect application submissions and accelerating time to revenue.”

With less than 20% of small businesses currently approved for loans through large banks, Worth AI’s platform offers a lifeline by improving approval rates through transparent credit scoring and non-traditional data insights.

Looking ahead, Worth AI plans to expand its WorthScore™ offering in 2025, providing a 360-degree financial profile for small businesses. “Worth is setting the bar of what a high-efficiency, high-tech onboarding solution should look like. Worth’s rapid growth is a testament to how it’s solving the issues all financial institutions face with their overly complex onboarding processes,” said Ramji.