Why Canapi is Leading Casca's Series A
It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Apply for a Loan
Every day, small business owners across the country run into the same problem: they need capital, but their bank isn’t built to meet them where they are.
Take Friday night at 10:30 p.m., statistically the most common time we see new loan applications begin. The work week is done, the kids are in bed, and a borrower finally sits down to apply for the $50,000 they need to restock inventory or expand their team. They visit their bank’s website only to find a downloadable PDF, a generic contact form, or instructions to call on Monday.
They fill out what they can, hit a confusing field like "EIN," and abandon the process. By the time a loan officer follows up, the borrower has already gone elsewhere, often to a non-bank lender promising instant approval but with interest rates north of 30 percent. It’s a missed opportunity for the bank and a costly outcome for the borrower.
What Banks Missed
Small businesses make up almost half of U.S. economic activity, and yet banks continue to lose ground when it comes to serving them.
Why?
Because for years, banks have poured resources into enhancing the middle of the lending process—credit models, risk scoring, and decisioning—while leaving the front end painfully underbuilt. Borrowers are still expected to find, understand, and submit complex documentation with little guidance. Even motivated applicants give up halfway through when they can’t locate requested information or interpret what the form is asking for. That's all assuming the bank even offers an online application in the first place.
And it’s not just borrowers who are frustrated.
Most LOS platforms on the market today weren’t built for modern lending. They’re expensive to implement, slow to customize, and fragmented across internal systems. The result is a broken workflow where applications stall, data lives in silos, and lending teams burn hours on repetitive tasks that should have been automated long ago. Many banks spend the majority of their time chasing down missing documents and correcting form errors rather than doing actual credit analysis.
What should be a five-minute application becomes a multi-week slog for both the borrower and the bank. Applications are abandoned. Loans are lost. And the only way to scale is by throwing more people at the problem.
At Canapi, we’ve long believed there’s a better path forward.
That belief led us to Cascading AI (“Casca”), an AI-native loan origination system purpose-built to unify and automate the lending process—optimizing the experience for all stakeholders across the continuum, from borrowers to bank employees.
Casca Makes Lending Click
Casca transforms loan origination by replacing siloed, manual workflows with a unified digital system that serves both the borrower and the bank. The platform creates a modern front-end experience, a smart operational engine, and built-in intelligence to automate eligibility, compliance, and decisioning.
On the back end, Casca pulls in data from across the bank's core and ancillary systems and auto-generates key credit outputs. It calculates debt service coverage ratios, packages SBA forms, and surfaces potential policy exceptions automatically. Teams can manage a full pipeline of loans through a single interface with less manual review and more reliable compliance checks.
The results are already evident. According to Casca, lenders have seen application completion rates rise from around 5 percent to more than 65 percent after implementation. Loan teams are producing more volume without increasing headcount. Banks are winning back borrowers who might have otherwise defaulted to high-cost lenders, not because of better pricing, but because the process is faster and simpler.
A Mission That Matters
Casca is more than just smart software. It is a purpose-driven company built by founders who deeply understand the problem they are solving. Co-founders Lukas Haffer and Isaiah Williams bring a unique combination of banking infrastructure and applied AI expertise. Together, they set out not just to improve LOS functionality, but to fix a broken system that was leaving too many small business borrowers behind.
Their mission is to make capital more accessible, more transparent, and more fair, especially for the small businesses that form the backbone of the American economy. Too often, these businesses are pushed toward high-interest, non-bank lenders because traditional institutions can't move fast enough or communicate clearly enough to win the relationship. Casca gives banks the tools to compete, and small businesses a path to capital that doesn't require compromising their future.
We've had the chance to work with Lukas and Isaiah in a number of ways over the past year. Their clarity of purpose, responsiveness to feedback, and speed of execution has resonated with the banks we introduced them to. The team has shown a unique willingness to embed alongside lenders to better understand daily workflows and regulatory nuance.
At Canapi, we know what it takes to bring bank-grade software to market. And for us, this one is personal. After a long search, we finally found a platform that can deliver the seamless, scalable lending infrastructure modern banks need. That’s why we’re proud to lead Casca’s Series A and help scale the next chapter of its growth.
Casca has the technology. It has the team. It has the trust of its early customers. We’re excited to support them because small businesses deserve better and banks deserve the infrastructure to deliver it.
