Worth, the fintech startup founded by sibling duo Suneera Madhani and Sal Rehmetullah, has raised a Series A round as the pair take on a stubborn bottleneck in small-business finance: the slow, fragmented process of onboarding and underwriting. Madhani and Rehmetullah previously built payments company Stax into a unicorn. With Worth, they are focusing on a different part of the stack, using AI to help financial institutions bring together credit assessment, fraud checks, and KYB and KYC workflows that often still rely on manual review and disconnected systems.
That problem is often less about credit demand than operational drag. Rehmetullah pointed to the kinds of mismatches that routinely derail underwriting, such as a business being known publicly by one name but registered legally under another at a home address, triggering extra documentation and delays. Worth says its AI models are built to resolve those inconsistencies in real time, cutting down on the back-and-forth that can stretch decisions into days.
The company also plans to expand into “Know Your Agent” frameworks, aimed at enabling autonomous AI agents to interact directly with financial institutions on behalf of business owners. For Madhani and Rehmetullah, the opportunity is to simplify a part of financial infrastructure that remains far more cumbersome for small businesses than it is for consumers.
