AbleCredit raises seed round led by Merak Ventures

AI credit underwriting company AbleCredit has raised $1.25 million or about Rs 10 crore in its seed round led by Merak Ventures. The round also saw participation from Venture Catalysts and Helios Holdings (Suraj Nalin).

This is the fourth investment from Merak Ventures this year.

The proceeds will be used to scale its AI operations, along with business growth and expansion,  AbleCredit said in a press release.

Founded by Utkarsh Apoorva, Harshad Saykhedkar, Ashwini Prabhu, and Anubhab Bandyopadhyay, the startup is developing generative AI models with voice, vision and language capabilities that function like an AI Assistant to the credit team and can generate credit reports on a case to case basis, while adhering to the Credit Policy and guidelines. 

AbleCredit’s model can be used even in the informal sector, which forms a bulk of new-to-credit customers, and is extremely data scarce. With this model, AbleCredit claims to have effectively increased underwriting speed by over 20x and decreased underwriting costs by enhancing the throughput of credit processes by 12x.

Early-stage venture capital firm Merak Ventures had launched a $100 million fund in November 2022 with plans to invest in up to 20 startups over the next three to four years.