Casca, operating as Cascading AI, is rebuilding the loan origination system (LOS) for the AI era. Traditional small-business lending is notoriously slow and labor-intensive: applicants face clunky forms, loan officers manually chase missing documents, and underwriters wade through hundreds of pages of financials. Casca's platform replaces that drudgery with AI agents that guide applicants, ingest and analyze documents, verify businesses, and keep deals moving automatically.
The product centers on an always-on AI loan assistant that answers applicant questions 24/7 and an automated document engine that can read more than 100 document types across thousands of pages, extracting and structuring the data underwriters need. Casca handles Know Your Business (KYB) verification, integrates with credit bureaus, calculates financial ratios, and generates loan documents. It serves FDIC-insured banks and non-bank lenders across small business, commercial, SBA, and USDA lending.
Casca reports compelling outcomes for lenders: a roughly 90% reduction in manual effort, a 12-day reduction in loan cycle time, a 312% increase in lead conversion driven by automated follow-ups, and the capacity to process up to 10x more loans with the same staff. A digital application flow contributes to roughly 3x higher conversion versus legacy intake. The platform advertises 30+ native integrations with data providers and lending systems.
The company raised a $29 million Series A with backing from Live Oak Ventures, the venture arm associated with Live Oak Bank, a major SBA lender, lending both capital and deep domain credibility to Casca's push into small-business lending automation. That backing positions Casca close to the institutions it sells to and signals confidence from a lender that understands SBA economics firsthand.
Casca's bet is that lending, long resistant to automation because of regulatory complexity and document heaviness, is precisely the workflow modern AI is suited to transform. By compressing cycle times and lifting conversion, it aims to make small-business lending both faster for borrowers and far more profitable for lenders.