Lama AI Raises $12 Million to Speed Business Loan Approvals with AI Agents

Fintech company Lama AI, founded in 2022, has raised $12 million in a new funding round led by EJF Ventures, bringing its total funding to more than $20 million. The company builds an AI agent platform for banks and other financial institutions to analyze, process and assess the risk of loans.

Lama AI says its technology helps lenders approve credit for a broader range of small and medium-sized businesses faster, more efficiently and more accurately. Since launching the platform, the company has expanded support across the full lifecycle of additional credit products, including corporate and industrial lending, commercial real estate and credit cards. It says customers have seen business performance improve by hundreds of percent, and the company itself reports year-over-year growth of 300%.

The round also included investors such as Fin Capital, 1st & Main, senior U.S. banking executives, and existing backers SixThirty, Viola Ventures and Hetz Ventures. Lama AI said it will use the money to expand its marketing and sales teams and meet rising demand from banks across the United States.

CEO and co-founder Omri Yaakubovitch said, “We live in a time when artificial intelligence is changing entire industries and the labor market at an extraordinary pace.” He added that Lama AI sees the opportunity “not as a way to replace people, but as a way to give excellent people greater influence,” and described the core problem as helping businesses get credit “faster, smarter and more responsibly.” Yaakubovitch previously founded Commerce Science, helped launch Bank Leumi’s digital bank Pepper, and served as VP of sales and marketing at Planck. Co-founder and CTO Ran Magen, a former Unit 8200 member, specializes in big data AI and real-time data processing, and later co-founded Gofer and advised Bank Leumi’s CTO on its data-driven transformation.