QUASH.ai lands $3.7M seed round to expand Latin American credit platform

By Riley Kaminer

Assessing creditworthiness is tricky business, especially for traditional financial institutions that lack the technology and insights to understand credit risks. This could leave money on the table for these organizations, or expose them to outsized risk.

Miami tech startup QUASH.ai is on a mission to make credit more accessible to individuals and SMBs across Latin America. The company has just closed a $3.7 million seed round to expand its services to more financial institutions going forward: 1,000 within the next 3 years, to be exact.

“We are thrilled to receive this investment and look forward to expanding our reach and helping even more financial institutions increase their credit originations,” CEO and founder Yoel Gavlovski said in a statement.

“We are dedicated to providing credit risk managers with the technology they need to make informed decisions and improve the lives of individuals and Small & Medium Businesses in Latin America.”

Investors include angels such as Alex Porto from Riverwood Capital, Barak Kaufman as scout from Insight Partners, as well as HTwenty, G2 Momentum and Q Capital Venture Capital firms.

Gavlovski founded QUASH.ai in 2019, and the company currently has upwards of 50 employees. About 70% of QUASH.ai’s clients are concentrated in Mexico and Brazil, the region’s two biggest countries, the startup says.

Gavlovski asserts that eight out of 10 Latin Americans do not meet the threshold for creditworthiness with reasonable interest rates. However, leveraging QUASH.ai’s artificial intelligence-powered platform, at least half of these eight people would now be eligible for a loan. The startup has pre-trained models for 14 financial products using data from over 30 million repayment events in 10 Latin American countries.

This year, QUASH.ai’s goal is to help 100 financial institutions increase credit originations by 20% without adding any risk. Latin America is fertile ground for fintech, with nearly a quarter of global fintech platforms being based in Latin America and the Caribbean. The industry has doubled in size over the last three years, in part spurred by pandemic-induced digitization efforts.

In a region with a widely expanding middle class, payments and digital lending are the most popular fintech verticals. However, other rapidly growing fintech sectors include business technology platforms for financial institutions, digital banks, and insurtech.

Closer to home, Miami is becoming somewhat of a hub for companies developing digital lending solutions. Boopos continues to grow its business financing platform and is on the way to becoming the investment bank for SMBs. Flexbase has developed a platform focusing on funding construction companies. And beyond lending, NovoPayment continues to develop a suite of fintech tools to enable payments across Latin America.

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Riley Kaminer

I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.