Artificial intelligence-powered credit ratings firm AIR has raised $6.1 million to invest in engineering for its eponymous automated credit intelligence platform, the firm said Wednesday.
Veterans of Moody’s, DataRobot and Goldman Sachs built AIR to allow any company’s financial health, whether public or private, to be evaluated every day, helping banks and private lenders determine companies’ credit worthiness, according to co-founder Glenn Carvajal. AIR can also be used for sensitivity analysis and stress-testing portfolios.
“We can actually take a qualitative question and break it down into quantitative metrics that then feeds our model to answer scenarios,” Carvajal said in an interview with Banking Dive. New York City-based AIR – which is short for Artificial Intelligence Ratings – has trained its AI agents to not only provide an answer, but to break down step-by-step how it arrived at that answer for the analyst to understand.
A real-world example: Soon after the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, a large private-credit shop asked AIR what would happen to oil company Aramco’s credit profile if Iran were to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. (The firm, which Carvajal did not name, is invested in Aramco.)
That’s the type of question AIR can answer, Carvajal said.
AIR trains its models on decades of financial data, including bond spreads, and continuously detects new data, re-rating companies in real time to present what it calls a “bias-free” view of risk, he said.
In an announcement seen by Banking Dive, Carvajal – a veteran of Moody’s and DataRobot – said legacy credit rating approaches “rely on manual methodologies that are slow and reactive, while quantitative models often become outdated the moment they go into production.”
“You compound this with bias embedded in almost every framework, and you have the same conditions that led to the financial crisis, with flawed ratings, poor underwriting, and systemic blind spots,” he said in the announcement. “We built AIR to supercharge an analyst’s ability to not miss anything, the equivalent of an Iron Man suit that is always on, adaptive, and constantly learning.”
Available data to make credit decisions has grown tenfold in the past decade, Work-Bench Ventures co-founder Jonathan Lehr said, but most financial institutions’ systems haven’t evolved in that time.
“AIR is closing that gap,” he said. “Their credit intelligence layer increases model transparency, accelerates analysis, and can reduce manual review time by 30 [percent] to 50%. That’s why we invested. The market needs infrastructure that enables participants to make faster, more accurate, and more explainable decisions.”
Work-Bench Ventures co-led AIR’s seed round with fellow New York City-based venture firm Lerer Hippeau.
Lehr said he expects AIR to “become core” to how modern financial institutions assess and price risk.
Andrea Hippeau, partner at investor Lerer Hippeau, told Banking Dive that AIR’s AI-driven credit scores “will be table stakes for every lender that wants to stay competitive.”
“As the industry shifts toward AI-driven credit workflows, we believe AIR has a real opportunity to define the category,” she said.
AIR works with financial institutions managing collectively more than $4 trillion in assets. With the fresh funding, the company plans to invest in product innovation, talent and strategic partnerships to accelerate growth, Carvajal said.
