Cyphr will reveal how it makes lending easier for small businesses at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

It happened one day.

Jannae Gammage has been working with the Small Business Administration as a technology consultant, helping businesses access capital through traditional lenders, such as banks and credit unions. However, she couldn’t stop thinking there was a problem: The ways lenders and businesses communicate were becoming woefully outdated, especially on the technology front.

“I was inside this mess, watching good companies die, while trying to navigate old workflows,” she told TechCrunch. “My actual job was to find the technology to solve this problem, and it didn’t exist. I couldn’t find anything.”

So she called her old friend, Alia Martin, and they got to work. In 2022, the duo began working on Sèvresa Kansas City-based company focused on making the lending process easier for lenders and small businesses. Cyphr is one of the top 20 finalists in The emerging battlefieldpart of TechCrunch disabled 2025.

The product analyzes alternative data sources and small business financial patterns to help lenders make decisions about the creditworthiness of small businesses. Cyphr has gone through a few iterations since its launch, but recent advances in artificial intelligence have paved the way for what the product is today. It will be officially launched in the market in April 2024.

“When we started, the problem we were trying to solve was: How can we make underwriting smarter and faster, so these entrepreneurs have access to capital?” said Gammage, CEO. “We wanted a world where money moved freely like in other sectors. We brought a borrower-centric experience, whereas a lot of companies focused on ‘how do we make this work for lenders’.”

They set out to build an LLM, using training data based on neglected business owners and their company financials, to help lenders make decisions about which companies to partner with.

“We were doing it manually,” Martin, the company’s chief operating officer, said of building LLM degrees before the recent AI update. “Even though we are an AI company, we started out doing it without really any help.”

Their current model is superior to OpenAI’s, which they fine-tuned themselves.

However, the latest updates in AI have done more than just enhance their product — they’ve made lenders more willing to work with them, Gammage said. The financial industry was already undergoing a transformation due to the coronavirus, knowing that it needed to digitize and modernize in some ways. “Now add this AI, where they use it every day, it will feel good,” she said.

“If we had gone to market in 2022, it would certainly have been very difficult to get approval, just because of the fear of technology and AI and the status quo,” Gammage said.

The company has raised $1 million so far. Gammage said the process was easy and difficult at the same time.

“The things I thought would be difficult weren’t difficult. The things I thought would be straightforward were not at all,” she said. One sore point was how capital flowed: they were watching their peers raise millions at a time, while for them, the money was coming in batches as they participated in accelerators and various competitions.

“It’s very difficult to have motivating moments when you receive your cash injection this way,” she said.

Meanwhile, Martin was worried about what it would be like to fundraise in San Francisco, where she was two black women with non-arts backgrounds from the Midwest. “We’re not what you think of when you think of a tech founder,” she said. But she said they didn’t have a big problem. “We’ve been really well received in Silicon Valley.”

“I’m so grateful that we were able to fundraise because I know less than 1% of us can say that,” Gammage added.

The company has big plans: It’s currently building a platform to help companies find opportunities when the World Cup comes to town next year. Gammage and Martin have also considered new locations for the company, although nothing is set in stone.

“We’re excited about the future of the company,” Gammage said, adding that a win at Disrupt’s Battlefield will help achieve those goals. “Even momentum requires money.”

If you want to learn more about Cyphr from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of other companies, hearing their ideas, and hearing from guest speakers at four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29 in San Francisco. Learn more here.