Casca

Casca's chief executive describes small business loans that took 90 days or longer to close when the work was done by hand, and that manual close is what remains without the agents. Agents are embedded across the origination chain rather than added at one step. They automate 100 manual steps, read more than 10,000 pages of tax returns, bank statements, financial statements and rent rolls, and run more than 40 know your business checks. The company argues that banking AI will not be built on decades old legacy systems, and at one community bank it replaced the legacy loan origination system outright.

Casca keeps people in the loop by design. Its terms say every communication the AI produces is reviewed by a human user, and it describes monitoring AI generations with humans in the loop against each bank's own compliance policies. Audit logs record every AI and human action, and access controls limit which bank employees can use which functions.

Approvals can run as automated decisions on the bank's own rules, and Casca publishes no threshold for where that automation hands a file to an officer. The AI loan assistant answers applicants and sends follow ups rather than deciding.

Verification breadth is the main control. More than 40 know your business checks, automatic credit score, bankruptcy and lien pulls, and more than 30 native integrations with outside data providers mean a conclusion rests on corroborated data rather than on document reading alone. Document analysis covers more than 100 document types. Casca publishes no extraction accuracy, decision error rate or validation result for that work. Audit logs keep a record of every AI and human action, which gives a validator a trail to sample.

Live Oak Bank runs Live Oak Express, its program for SBA loans up to $350,000, on Casca, and reported $56 million of Live Oak Express originations in the first quarter of 2026 while piloting the platform, up from $38 million the quarter before. Huntington and Celtic Bank are also customers, and Live Oak, Huntington and Bankwell Financial Group invested in the $29 million Series A of August 2025, which Canapi Ventures led with Live Oak Ventures and other investors joining.

Live Oak Bancshares chief executive Chip Mahan and TF Lending principal Chad Thomas are quoted by name, Thomas on a 90 day SBA process turned into a 14 day sprint. Casca's own figures are a 90 percent reduction in manual effort, loan cycle times five days shorter and a 312 percent increase in lead conversion.

Whether data is isolated per institution, and whether models learn across the customer base, is left open by any boundary statement, and the shareholder structure makes that question sharper. Live Oak and Huntington, which American Banker ranks as the top two SBA 7(a) lenders by agency figures, are both customers and investors, so two lenders competing for the same borrowers run on a platform that sees application flow and outcomes for both.

Casca's privacy policy covers site visitors and California privacy rights rather than borrower data on the platform, and no data protection agreement, retention schedule or subprocessor list is published for that data. The gap sits on a product handling the owner's personal tax returns and bank statements alongside business records, which more than 30 data provider integrations also pass outward.

Casca names SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 1 Type 2 reports and penetration testing, with an in house security team and independent assessments by outside firms it does not name. No trust portal publishes the reports, controls or subprocessors. Enterprise features include Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) single sign on, audit logs and data lifecycle management, and Casca says its contracts set out firm security commitments.

The platform runs inside a named federal program with its own eligibility, documentation and guarantee rules. SBA eligibility checks are built on the agency's Standard Operating Procedure rules, applications go to the SBA directly through E-Tran, and know your business checks are automated. Its customers are insured banks whose examiners review origination files.

Casca's terms state that it is not a lender and makes no credit decisions, and it claims no license or examination of its own, which is the correct posture for a software provider whose bank customers carry the regulatory obligations.

Casca's agents pull credit, run know your business checks, calculate debt service coverage and cash flow, and feed approvals that can run as automated decisions, so its AI sits inside the small business credit decision even though the bank owns the outcome. Casca publishes no disparate impact testing of those models and no method for producing adverse action reasons, the evidence a fair lending review of an automated SBA process starts from.

What it does publish is an access case: its investors describe a faster, fairer way for banks to serve small businesses, Live Oak backs it as an alternative to high cost merchant cash advances, and applicants accept Equal Credit Opportunity Act disclosures before they apply.

Under its terms, the decision and its consequences sit with the lender. Casca is not a lender, makes no credit decisions, gives no warranty and does not guarantee the accuracy of third party data, and an applicant's offers, approvals and disclosures come from the bank. An applicant declined after automated document analysis and dozens of outside checks has no route through Casca to learn which check failed or to correct the data behind it. What Casca does offer toward a challenge is the audit log of every AI and human action, which a bank can use to reconstruct how a file was handled.

The data chain is described by count rather than content: more than 30 native integrations with providers Casca calls best in class, with no bureau, verification service, banking data aggregator or model provider named. Cloud infrastructure is named by example, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which says where the software can run rather than whose models read a borrower's documents. For a platform whose decisions rest on outside checks, the providers behind them set both coverage and failure modes.

The SBA's E-Tran system is named for direct submission, and more than 30 native integrations bring in credit bureau, bankruptcy, lien and business verification data and prefill the application. The borrower application, applicant portal and AI loan assistant are part of the product rather than a portal added on, and a bank can set up a new loan product in 30 minutes without writing code. The credit bureaus, data providers and core banking systems behind those integrations go unnamed. Go live takes as little as two weeks, and one community bank had its full loan origination system replaced in three weeks.

All data stays within the United States, a residency commitment a federally supervised lender needs before placing guaranteed loan files with an outside platform. Casca builds on cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, without saying which host runs which part of the service. Data lifecycle management is offered as an enterprise feature.

Whether Casca charges by application processed, loan funded or institutional license goes unstated, and no pricing or packaging is published. Its own argument is that unit economics decide whether small loans get made at all, which makes its cost to the bank part of that case.

Buyers span FDIC insured community banks, regional banks, nationally leading government program lenders and nonbank lenders. Named institutions range from a $3.4 billion asset bank to a $15.3 billion one, so the platform is evidenced across different institution sizes. Coverage is deliberately concentrated on small business and government guaranteed lending in a single country, with commercial lending adjacent, so depth is bought at the cost of breadth.