Yogi Nishanth spent much of his career in financial services, working for banks such as JP Morgan, Chase, and Capital One. In the back of his mind, he always wanted to start a company. Recently, he began working on a few AI startups and found himself in touch with a venture studio, which prodded him to work up his own project in the space he already knew the most about.
This ultimately led Nishanth to wonder how AI could be leveraged in the lending space. He thought back to his consumer lending days, when underwriting decisions could be made in minutes using structured data models that quickly generated risk profiles for individual customers—making approvals relatively straightforward.
Small business lending, however, is much more fragmented. Financial information is unstructured—spread across tax returns, bank statements, operational data and financial reports—requiring underwriters to manually reconcile information from multiple sources, verify its accuracy and draft detailed credit memos before a loan can be approved. This process can require weeks of tedious labor for an underwriter and leave a small business in limbo with its loan approval.
“Now, can we leverage AI to capture and synthesize all this information and underwrite a small business loan in minutes,” Nishanth said.
Swik AI: An Intelligence Layer
Nisanth pinpointed this slowdown in the small business loaning process and created Swik AI, a new startup providing an intelligence layer designed to speed up the underwriting process for small business loans.
“So the way we are approaching this is [a client] does not have to change any system, rather we will add an intelligence layer on top of the existing systems,” Nishanth said.
Swik can ingest financial information from spreadsheets, PDFs and other sources, reconcile inconsistencies across tax returns, bank statements and financial statements, and return verified information back into a lender’s existing software.
The platform integrates with loan origination systems, CRM platforms and email systems such as Gmail and Outlook. Swik AI can also automate invoice verification workflows by reaching out to buyers, tracking responses and compiling verification records for lenders. Additionally, the platform can help draft first-pass credit memos used in lending decisions.
Altogether, the result is that tasks that previously required hours of manual review by underwriters can instead be automated, reducing underwriting timelines for smaller business loans. And through automating repetitive administrative work, Swik AI is actually keeping humans involved in a simplified lending process, rather than aiming to replace underwriters.
“So essentially, the way we are approaching things is to never replace human judgment, but instead do all the grunt work while keeping the human in the loop at the right places,” Nishanth said. “At every step, the underwriter has confidence in what the AI is doing.”
Pilot Programs and What’s Next
Swik AI is currently running pilot programs with factoring companies, a type of lender that provides businesses with upfront cash in exchange for unpaid invoices. In a typical factoring arrangement, a business may be waiting 30, 60 or 90 days for a customer payment, but instead sells that invoice to a factor in order to access working capital immediately.
Before advancing money, factoring companies must verify that invoices are legitimate and that the buyer intends to pay the agreed amount on time. This process is often handled manually through phone calls, emails and document reviews. Swik AI is automating portions of that workflow by helping factors conduct invoice verification outreach, track responses and compile verification records. Nishanth said the company is also designing the platform to adapt to the slightly different workflows used by each factoring company.
“We are thinking, ‘how can we configure this so that your team can benefit from this work automation?’” Nishanth said.
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Startup: Swik AI
Founder: Yogi Nishanth
Founded: 2025
Team size: 1
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: swik.ai
Funding: Pre-seed
Moving forward, Swik AI is taking a phased approach to growing the business. The startup is currently focused on alternate lenders, such as factoring and asset-based lending firms, which typically have shorter sales cycles and can adopt new technology more quickly than traditional banks.
Nishanth said the strategy allows the company to validate the product through pilots, paying customers and real-world workflows before expanding into more heavily regulated financial institutions. Because smaller loans can be expensive to process relative to their size, Swik AI aims to reduce underwriting costs through automation, enabling lenders to process a greater volume of loans while helping small businesses access funding faster.
Over the next year, the company hopes to scale its beta product and begin working with banks and credit unions as it expands into additional underwriting workflows. Long term, Nishanth said he envisions Swik AI becoming embedded throughout the small business lending ecosystem, operating behind the scenes during some stage of the loan application process.
“The grand goal, in the next five years, is that Swik would be integrated in the small business lending space so well that if a small business is applying for a loan, then they will touch Swik in one or more parts of the lending process,” Nishanth said.
