Karthik Nandyal

Karthik Nandyal spends his days on a market most people never think about and few outside finance can see. Enterprise debt - the loans and credit agreements that companies use to fund themselves - moves roughly $5 trillion a year. Yet much of it still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads. At CredCore, the New York company he co-founded in 2022 and now runs as co-CEO, Nandyal is trying to give that market the software it never got.

The pitch is simple to state and hard to build: bring AI to the entire life of a debt deal, from the first read of a credit agreement to the monitoring of a loan years later.

CredCore describes itself as a vertical-AI company. Rather than a general chatbot, it builds AI agents tuned specifically for debt capital markets - tools that read, summarize, and pull structured data out of dense deal documents, then keep watch on portfolios after a deal closes. The company pairs those models with senior credit expertise, a human-in-the-loop approach meant to make the output trustworthy enough for people whose job is measured in basis points.

In February 2025, the company announced a $16 million Series A led by Avataar Ventures, with participation from Inspired Capital, Fitch Group, and BellTower Partners, alongside senior executives from asset management and financial services. By the company's own account, its platform now supports oversight of more than $650 billion in assets under management for U.S. asset managers and corporations. Later that year, CredCore won the Banking category at the 2025 Money20/20 Awards, beating out a field that included FICO, J.P. Morgan Payments, Revolut, and Nubank.

That comparison to equities is the heart of how Nandyal sees the opportunity. Stock markets went through their technology revolution decades ago - electronic trading, real-time data, automation that stripped friction out of every transaction. Credit largely sat that revolution out. The documents are longer, the terms more bespoke, the workflows more manual. And the market is bigger.

His argument is that recent AI advances finally make the hard part tractable. "AI advancements like self-deployed models and more efficient architectures are enabling greater automation and enhanced data privacy," he has said - and for a business built on confidential deal terms, the privacy piece matters as much as the automation. It is what lets CredCore, in his words, "guarantee outcomes for our customers."

The framing is deliberately unglamorous. Nandyal is not selling a market that is trendy; he is selling one that is enormous, essential, and overlooked. That contrarian choice - going after the boring, hard problem rather than the shiny one - runs through his whole career.

Nandyal did not arrive at credit by accident. He spent years inside capital markets technology, with roles at IBM, Instinet (the Reuters trading unit), and BNP Paribas, where he worked in equity derivatives and helped build a high-frequency trading business for a major global bank. That was a front-row seat to the exact transformation he now wants to bring to credit - watching software reshape how equities were priced and traded.

He later served as senior vice president and head of product, platform, and R&D for the Financial Innovation Group at Reliance Jio, the Indian telecom-and-technology giant, working at the scale where financial products meet hundreds of millions of users.

He is also a two-time founder. Before CredCore, he co-founded and led Styloot, a startup launched around 2011 that let women shop for fashion visually - browsing virtual mannequins or pointing an iPhone at clothing to find similar items. It was a very different product from a credit-agreement parser, but the underlying instinct was the same: take something people did slowly and manually, and make software do it.

At CredCore he shares the top job with co-founder Saumil Annegiri. The two run the company as co-CEOs, splitting leadership of a company that has scaled quickly since its Series A.

Private credit has been one of the fastest-growing corners of finance, and the plumbing beneath it has struggled to keep up. Deals still move through hundreds of pages of legal language, obligations buried in clauses, covenants that have to be tracked by hand. Miss one, and the cost is real.

CredCore's platform is built to automate that whole lifecycle: evaluating a deal before it closes, extracting the terms and clauses that matter, generating plain-English summaries and obligation checklists, then monitoring covenants and portfolios afterward. The promise is speed without losing rigor - the AI does the reading, and experienced credit people check the work.

Whether Nandyal is right that credit is due for its equities moment is still being proven. But the early signals - a Series A from a serious investor group, a growing footprint among asset managers, an industry award over incumbents many times CredCore's size - suggest the market is at least listening.