Somewhere right now, a customer is staring at a charge they don't recognize - or one they recognize perfectly well and would rather not pay for. They tap "dispute." What happens next has, for decades, been a slow, manual, expensive scramble inside a bank: forms, fax-era card-network rules, a human reading transaction metadata at midnight. Casap built AI agents to do that work instead. Quietly, in two offices on two coasts, it has turned the dispute queue into something a machine can win.
"Financial institutions are under pressure to do more with less: stronger consumer retention, fewer losses, and no regulatory missteps."
Disputes are a multi-billion-dollar mess nobody volunteers to clean
Every card swipe, ACH pull, and ATM withdrawal carries a small chance of going wrong - and a smaller, stranger chance of going wrong on purpose. Payment disputes are the back office where all of that lands. They are governed by an alphabet of rules (Reg-E, Reg-Z, NACHA, the card networks), bound by tight regulatory clocks, and historically handled by people clicking through screens. For a bank, every dispute is a cost, a compliance risk, and a moment a customer might decide to leave.
Then there is the part of the problem nobody likes to name: first-party fraud, the polite term for customers disputing charges they actually made. It hides inside the legitimate complaints, and telling the two apart by hand is roughly as fun as it sounds. The industry's answer for years was to hire more people and hope. Casap's bet was that the answer was software that could read the case as well as a trained analyst - and never get tired at midnight.
"Disputes were a cost center everyone tolerated. Casap's wager is that they can be a place you actually win."
Two product people who had already seen the number
Casap was founded in 2022 by Shanthi Shanmugam and Saisi Peter - not academics theorizing about fraud, but operators who had lived inside it. Shanmugam was a product leader at Robinhood; Peter was a product manager at Chime, where, by the company's account, she helped build AI-driven dispute resolution that saved roughly $10 million a year. That is a useful thing to have done before starting a company about disputes: you already know the prize is real.
Their insight was less "AI can do this" and more "this specific, unloved workflow is exactly the shape AI is good at." Disputes are repetitive, rule-bound, evidence-heavy, and time-sensitive. Shanmugam later landed on the Inc. Female Founder 500. The bet was simple to state and hard to build: an agent that handles the whole lifecycle, not a chatbot bolted onto an old system.
"The agents financial institutions have been waiting for."
★ The short, fast history of Casap
One platform that runs the whole dispute, start to finish
Casap is an agentic AI platform purpose-built for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. It manages the dispute lifecycle end to end - intake, investigation, the credit, the merchant response, the chargeback - across every transaction type a financial institution touches: card, digital payment, EFT, ATM, check, and ACH. Compliance with Reg-E, Reg-Z, NACHA, and card-network rules isn't an add-on; it's baked into how each case moves.
The cleverer trick is prediction. Casap's agents score the likelihood that a dispute is first-party fraud, and predict the "win score" of a chargeback before the institution commits resources to it. Customers get multi-channel self-service instead of a phone tree. The result, by Casap's numbers, is a 97% chargeback win rate, 3x faster resolution, and 40% fewer calls - and it plugs into the core systems banks already run, like Symitar.
Dispute Management
Full lifecycle from intake to chargeback - automating credits, merchant responses, and case handling across all payment rails.
Agentic AI Agents
Triage, investigate, and resolve disputes with win-score prediction baked in.
First-Party Fraud Scoring
AI decisioning that separates genuine claims from "friendly fraud" to cut losses.
Compliance Engine
Reg-E, Reg-Z, NACHA, and card-network rules enforced on every dispute, automatically.
What customers report after switching to Casap
Investors, credit unions, and a stage full of bankers
Money has a way of confirming a thesis. Casap closed its $8.5M seed in October 2024 led by Lightspeed, then a $25M Series A in August 2025 led by Emergence Capital, with SoFi and Primary in the round - $33.5M in total, described as a record for the payment-disputes sector. The customer side has names too: credit-union stories like Chartway and MidSouth, and workflows that ride the rails of Mastercard, Visa, Star, and Symitar.
And then there's the validation that's harder to buy: Best of Show at FinovateFall 2025, voted by an audience of financial professionals who have seen every "we'll fix disputes" demo there is. Casap is PCI-DSS and AICPA certified - table stakes, but the kind banks actually check.
"$33.5M into a corner of fintech most people never think about. That's either a niche or a moat."
Co-founder Saisi Peter reportedly built dispute automation at Chime that saved ~$10M a year - then left to build Casap.
The team runs from San Francisco and New York City at the same time.
First-party fraud - disputing charges you actually made - is the problem Casap was built to expose.
Emergence Capital, Lightspeed, Primary Venture Partners, and SoFi are on the cap table.
Turn the cost center into a reason customers stay
Casap's stated aim is plain: automate dispute and fraud operations so institutions can do more with less - fewer losses, no regulatory missteps, and a customer who, having been treated fairly and fast, decides to stick around. The company frames disputes not as paperwork to survive but as a moment of trust to win. Its longer ambition is to be the post-transaction risk intelligence layer sitting beneath every bank, credit union, and fintech.
Internally, the values are unfussy: purpose-driven work with direct customer impact, a collaborative room that wants different viewpoints, and a habit of moving fast without dropping the standard. For a company whose product is mostly invisible until something goes wrong, that's a sensible way to build.
"Build the layer banks didn't know they were missing - and make the worst day of a customer's month the easiest part of it."
Back to that midnight tap
Return to the customer staring at the unfamiliar charge. In the old version, they tap "dispute" and disappear into a queue - days of waiting, a stranger reading their case, a coin-flip outcome. In Casap's version, an agent reads the transaction, scores the claim, checks the rules, and moves - in hours, not weeks, with the regulation handled and the merchant response already drafted. The bank loses less. The customer leaves less often. And the back office that everyone tolerated becomes a place that actually works.
That's the whole pitch, and it's a narrow one on purpose. Casap didn't set out to reinvent banking. It set out to fix the one unloved workflow where AI is unusually well-suited and the savings are unusually concrete. Whether disputes become a category or stay a niche, the customer at midnight no longer has to care. Which, in the end, is the point.