ai-lending
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Chantal Rapport
Before Chantal Rapport marketed algorithms, she learned to read customers from a cable truck. That habit - get close, notice the friction, then build the model - followed her all the way to Upstart's C-suite.
Upstart
Upstart wants to replace the blunt instrument of conventional credit scoring with a learning system that prices each borrower more precisely. Its next test is larger than approval rates: proving an AI marketplace can grow through a full credit cycle without becoming the bank it once said it did not need to be.
SuperAtom Fintech
SuperAtom Fintech is a Singapore-based financial technology company founded in 2018 as a spin-off from Cheetah Mobile. It builds digital lending and buy-now-pay-later products for underserved and unbanked consumers in emerging markets, using AI and big data to approve and disburse small, collateral-free loans quickly. Its flagship product UangMe operates in Indonesia under an OJK license, and the company has expanded toward the Philippines and Latin America with its Peso Chido brand. SuperAtom reports around 9 million registered users and over US$684 million in cumulative loan disbursements.
Karl Jacob
Karl Jacob is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of LoanSnap, an AI-driven mortgage startup that pitched itself as the fix for a $13 trillion industry. Over more than two decades he founded or led companies including Dimension X (sold to Microsoft), Keen/Ingenio (sold to AT&T), Cloudmark (sold to Proofpoint) and Coveroo (sold to Zazzle), became one of Facebook's earliest advisors in 2005, and angel-invested in dozens of startups. LoanSnap raised roughly $100 million from backers like True Ventures, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Reid Hoffman and Joe Montana before unraveling amid lawsuits, regulatory fines and an eviction between 2022 and 2024.
Siam Digital Lending
Siam Digital Lending (SiamDL) is a Bangkok-based, Bank of Thailand-licensed digital lender that uses agentic AI to approve and disburse personal and nano-finance loans entirely online - no branches, no paperwork. Its proprietary AiTHENA underwriting engine analyzes thousands of data points to extend responsible credit to Thais often shut out of the formal banking system, with the explicit aim of pulling borrowers out of the reach of loan sharks. The company raised an oversubscribed $7.8M Series A in April 2026.
Max Meyer
Max Meyer is an American founder and former piano prodigy who built two of Thailand's best-known fintech companies. After winning America's Most Talented Kids at 14, a piano scholarship to Phillips Academy Andover, Harvard, and three years at McKinsey in China, he co-founded the financial-comparison platform Masii in 2016 - the only Thai startup on KPMG's global Fintech100. He is the founder of Siam Digital Lending (SiamDL), a Bank of Thailand-licensed AI lender that raised an oversubscribed $7.8M Series A in 2026 to give working Thais shut out of bank credit fast, fair loans.
Larry Katz
Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.