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 started working on several AI startups and found himself in contact with venture studios, which inspired him to launch his own project in the field he already knows best.
This ultimately led Nishanth to wonder how AI could be leveraged in the lending space. He recalled the days of consumer finance. Back then, underwriting decisions could be made in minutes using structured data models that quickly generated risk profiles for individual customers, and approvals were relatively simple.
However, SME financing is further fragmented. Financial information is unstructured and spans tax returns, bank statements, operating data, and financial reports, and underwriters must manually reconcile information from multiple sources, verify its accuracy, and create detailed credit memos before a loan is approved. This process requires weeks of tedious work for underwriters and can leave small businesses unable to get approved for a loan.
“Can we leverage AI to take all this information, synthesize it, and underwrite small business loans in minutes?” said Nishanth.
Swik AI: Intelligence Layer
Nisanth pinpointed this slowdown in the SME lending process and founded Swik AI, a new startup that provides an intelligence layer designed to speed up the SME loan underwriting process.
“So the way we approach this is [a client] There is no need to change the system, rather we add a layer of intelligence on top of the existing system,” Nishanth said.
Swik can ingest financial information from spreadsheets, PDFs, and other sources, reconcile discrepancies between tax returns, bank statements, and financial statements, and feed 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 validation workflows by contacting buyers, tracking responses, and compiling lender validation records. In addition, the platform also helps draft first-pass credit memos that are used in loan decisions.
Collectively, this results in faster underwriting schedules for small business loans by automating tasks that previously required hours of manual review by underwriters. And by automating repetitive administrative tasks, Swik AI is not aiming to replace underwriters, but actually keeps humans involved in the simplified lending process.
“Essentially, the way we approach things is not to replace human judgment in any way, but to keep humans informed in the right places while doing all the heavy lifting,” Nishanth said. “Every step of the way, insurers have confidence in how AI works.”
Pilot program and future developments
Swik AI is currently running a pilot program with a factoring company, a type of lender that provides upfront cash to businesses in exchange for unpaid invoices. In a typical factoring agreement, a business waits 30, 60, or 90 days for a customer to pay, but instead sells the invoice to a factoring company for immediate access to working capital.
Before advancing funds, the factoring company must verify that the invoice is legitimate and that the buyer intends to pay the agreed upon amount on time. This process is often handled manually through phone calls, emails, and document reviews. Swik AI automates some of that workflow by helping Factors conduct invoice verification outreach, track responses, and compile verification records. Nishanth said the company is also designing a platform that adapts to the slightly different workflows used by each factoring company.
“We’re thinking, ‘How can we configure this so that our teams can benefit from automating this work?'” Nishanth says.
quick bit
Startup: Swik AI
Founder: Yogi Nishans
Established: 2025
Team size: 1
Location: Chapel Hill
Website: Suiku Eye
Funding: Pre-seed
Going forward, Swik AI will take a step-by-step approach to growing its business. The company is now focusing on alternative lending companies, such as factoring and asset-based lending companies, which typically have shorter sales cycles and can adopt new technology faster than traditional banks.
Nishanth said the strategy allows the company to validate its product through pilots, customer payments and real-world workflows before expanding into more highly regulated financial institutions. Because small loans can be expensive to process relative to their size, Swik AI aims to reduce underwriting costs through automation, allowing lenders to process more loans and helping small businesses get funding faster.
The company hopes to expand its beta product over the next year and begin working with banks and credit unions as it scales additional underwriting workflows. In the long term, Nishanth said he envisions Swik AI being embedded throughout the small business lending ecosystem, working behind the scenes at some stage of the loan application process.
“The grand goal for the next five years is that Swik will be well integrated into the small business lending space, so that when a small business applies for a loan, it will use Swik for one or more parts of the loan process,” Nishanth said.
