“Ten years ago, I couldn’t even tell my friends I was working in AI because it sounded like sci-fi,” Yoel Gavlovski told Refresh Miami.
“So I said, no, I work in data,” Gavlovski continued. “Well, that’s super boring.”
Fast forward to today, and AI is everywhere. But Gavlovski, a Venezuelan Jewish immigrant and Miami-based founder, believes most financial institutions are still barely scratching the surface of what it can actually do, especially when it comes to credit.
That belief is driving Quash, the AI platform he launched in 2020 to help financial institutions better identify creditworthy borrowers who might otherwise be overlooked. And now, the company has closed a fresh $2.6 million round at a $35.6 million post-money valuation, bringing its total funding to roughly $7 million since inception.
The latest round was led by South Florida-based Joshua B. Siegel, general partner at Acronym Venture Capital, with participation from investors including Insight Partners’ scouting fund, and H20 Capital.
Gavlovski’s path to fintech wasn’t linear. An engineer by training with an MBA in finance, he was pulled into the AI world early through his brother, Avi Gavlovski, one of the early builders behind Facebook’s advertising infrastructure. Long before AI became a buzzword, Gavlovski was working on systems that could anticipate customer behavior at scale.
At the same time, he was navigating life in the U.S. as a first-generation immigrant trying to build credit from scratch. He noticed something that stuck with him: friends in Latin America with far more family wealth were paying dramatically higher interest rates than he was.
“Credit is synonymous with quality of living,” he said. “People that had more wealth in their families were having a lower quality of living because they didn’t have access to affordable credit.”
That disconnect became the seed for Quash.
The company’s core thesis is simple: traditional credit scoring is too rigid and too reactive. Banks and credit unions rely heavily on static scores and historical data. Quash aims to act as what Gavlovski describes as a refinery that transfers raw internal and external data into predictive, customized decisioning models.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all credit decision, Quash allows institutions to build more nuanced predictions across prequalification, income estimation, payment capacity, interest rates, credit line increases, and more. “The biggest prize comes from customization,” Gavlovski said. “Not just approving loans at the right risk, but truly understanding your borrower.”
Quash offers three main products. The first is an inclusion score that leverages digital identity data – such as subscription payments or mobile carrier history – to fill gaps traditional bureaus often miss, all within existing regulatory frameworks. The second is a predictive decision engine that plugs into a financial institution’s workflow to personalize approvals and pricing in real time. The third is a vertical GenAI credit agent designed to help institutions simulate models, build dashboards, and generate reports in a closed, compliant environment.
“The idea is confidence, profitability, autonomy, independence,” Gavlovski said, describing how the three products build on each other.
Since launching in 2020, Quash has grown to serve what Gavlovski says will be more than 250 financial institutions in 2026. The company employs around 40 people and is headquartered in Miami, though the team operates largely remotely.
Now, with fresh capital in the bank, Quash is turning its focus squarely toward U.S. credit unions, a segment Gavlovski believes is under intense pressure. The average age of a credit union member in the U.S. is 51, he noted, while younger borrowers increasingly expect the kind of personalization they get from digital-native platforms.
“If you’re not understanding that millennial need, you’re losing that member,” he said.
Pictured above: Quash Founder and CEO Yoel Gavlovski, at left, with Quash investor Joshua B. Siegel, general partner at Acronym Venture Capital.
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