Deduction, a US-based FinTech specialising in AI-driven tax automation and human-CPA-supported services, has launched “Taylor, CPAI,” which it describes as the first AI tax accountant designed specifically for consumers.

The company has emerged from stealth alongside a $2.8m pre-seed funding round led by One Way Ventures and Creator Ventures, with participation from Alpine VC, Intuition, Charley Moore of Rocket Lawyer, and angel investors from OpenAI and Robinhood.

The launch of Taylor, CPAI comes as Deduction seeks to transform the way everyday taxpayers access accounting support. The company aims to bridge the gap between rising tax complexity and the growing shortage of CPAs, while offering a faster, more affordable alternative to traditional accountants.

The FinTech currently helps consumers communicate with Taylor, CPAI via call, text, chat, or email without the need for an app or lengthy questionnaires. The system automates document collection, proactive planning, return generation, and financial Q&A, while ensuring all critical steps are reviewed by human professionals.

Taylor, CPAI offers users fast answers, compliant filings, and proactive tax optimisation. It also identifies deductions and credits, sources documents such as W2s and 1099s, reads a wide variety of financial forms, and tracks tax-related events including RMDs and option exercises. All filings are overseen by licensed CPAs, and the platform includes a 100% guarantee against interest and penalties.

Deduction co-founder and CEO Sai Dhanak said, “Most AI tax tools are B2B, and focus on software for accountants and increasing margins. We built Deduction to radically improve the end-customer experience. With Taylor, CPAI, anyone can have a personal accountant, without the wait, the paperwork, or the high expense.”
Deduction co-founder and CTO Jonathank Kieliszak said, “The big consumer AI tools largely cater to users with very generalized tasks and needs. But a great accountant is highly specialized, refined and experienced, which is why Taylor is built alongside our human CPA team with specific guardrails and information sources to deliver trustworthy tax support.”

source [Fintech Global]

Norm Ai, a NYC-based legal and compliance AI company, raised $50M in funding.

​​The round was led by Blackstone, through Blackstone Innovations Investments and funds affiliated with Blackstone Growth.

The company intends to sue the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.

Ledd by CEO Norm Ai is a legal and compliance AI company that turns legal code into AI code enabling enterprises to move faster and more comprehensively in their legal and compliance processes. Its platform combines frontier AI, proprietary legal reasoning systems, and embedded legal and regulatory expertise.
The company has also launched Norm Law LLP, which will offer AI-native legal services, with an initial focus on financial services clients.

Blackstone, along with global banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other asset managers, leverages its solutions to streamline key legal and compliance workflows.

Norm Ai has raised more than $140M to date.

FinSMEs

Stuut Technologies, a NYC-based AI platform that automates accounts receivable work for companies, raised $29.5m in combined Series A funding.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Activant Capital, Khosla Ventures, 1984.vc, Page One Ventures, Vesey Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and Valley Ventures. Seema Amble from Andreessen Horowitz and Steve Sarracino from Activant Capital will join the board.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its autonomous account receivable capabilities for mid-market and enterprise companies across six key functionalities: collections, payments, cash application, deductions, credits, and disputes.

Founded by Tarek Alaruri, Miraj Mohsin, and Ben Winter, Stuut Technologies provides autonomous AI agents that handle collections, cash application, payments, and deductions, learning each customer’s patterns while integrating with existing ERP systems.

Stuut integrates with SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Dynamics, and other major financial systems and works for international businesses.

Customers include ZoomInfo, Bishop Lifting, Honeywell, and PerkinElmer.
​
FinSMEs

SAN FRANCISCO---Synthio Labs, a clinical-grade voice AI company transforming how life sciences organisations engage clinicians and patients, today announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Elevation Capital with participation from 1984 Ventures, Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator, and several strategic angels from the global healthcare and AI ecosystem.

“We believe Synthio Labs is defining the next major Customer Engagement infrastructure for Life Sciences. Their Clinical-grade Voice AI platform unifies how pharma communicates - giving field teams a powerful voice companion, and giving physicians and patients instant, trusted, compliant answers 24/7. Pharma’s global Commercial and GTM footprint is a trillion-dollar machine ripe for reinvention, and Synthio has exactly the right team to deliver on this mission,” said Krishna Mehra, AI Partner, Elevation Capital.
​
Pharma companies spend over $30 billion every year to engage doctors and patients, yet most communication is still manual, fragmented, and difficult to scale. Doctors are flooded with information, and many patients do not get regular support, leading to treatment drop-off rates of up to 50% in long-term illnesses. Synthio Labs aims to solve this problem with compliant and real-time Voice AI that helps deliver clear, accurate medical information to every doctor and patient. This technology can support pharma companies and healthcare providers globally, especially in chronic care and large patient support programs.

Synthio Labs’ AI Operating System unifies three flagship platforms: Jarvis, the clinical-grade Voice AI copilot for field teams; Ather, the multimodal AI engine that powers seamless omnichannel engagement with physicians and patients; and Simulation Studio, the advanced insight platform that generates high-fidelity digital twins of clinicians and patients for research and strategy. Together, these products help life-sciences teams automate compliant conversations, capture structured intelligence at scale, and deliver consistent, human-grade experiences to every clinician and patient.

“Beyond breakthrough medicines, the future of healthcare will depend on how we reach and support every clinician and patient who relies on them,” said Supreet Deshpande, Co-founder and CEO of Synthio Labs. “At Synthio, we’re building the AI infrastructure that makes that possible - intelligently, compliantly, and at scale,” added Rajashekar Vasantha, Co-founder and CTO.

Sahitya Sridhar, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, said, “We’re designing products that make every conversation between pharma and their customers smarter, faster, and more meaningful. Healthcare is moving into a world of abundance. Our view is simple: bring consumer-grade experiences to pharma and empower the people delivering care.”

Early adopters include several of the Top 10 Pharma Companies and leading D2C healthcare brands who are using Synthio’s Voice AI to transform physician and patient engagement. In one project, Synthio’s Voice AI reached more than 5,000 eczema patients in 48 hours, highlighting its ability to scale personalized support rapidly.
Rafal Pielak, Founder and CEO, Soteri Skin, said, “It’s been a pleasure working with the Synthio Labs team. They built a voice AI agent that engaged thousands of eczema patients, completing 5,000 calls in just two days. The agent supported onboarding, screening, and patient assistance end-to-end, fully automating our feedback and review collection. We’re very happy with the results and look forward to working together again.”

Synthio Labs was founded by Supreet Deshpande, Sahitya Sridhar and Rajashekar Vasantha, an India-origin team with early academic and professional roots in the country. The founders bring deep expertise across pharma strategy and advanced AI engineering, built through leadership roles at McKinsey, ZS Associates, Amazon and Audible. They have led multi-million-dollar commercial programmes for global life sciences companies and played key roles in developing foundational LLMs and multi-agent voice systems at Amazon and Audible. The company plans to use this funding to expand its engineering and product teams, scale enterprise deployments across the U.S. and Europe, and deepen its partnerships with leading life sciences clients. Synthio aims to establish AI-driven engagement as the new standard for how pharma teams support clinicians and patients globally.
For more details, please refer to this video link: Synthio Labs Funding Announcement

About Synthio Labs
Synthio Labs is a clinical-grade conversational voice AI company that helps life sciences organizations engage clinicians and patients through secure, compliant, and intelligent voice technology. Its suite of AI products Jarvis, Ather, and Simulation Studio, powers omnichannel engagement for global pharma and biotech teams. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with teams across India and the U.S., Synthio is backed by Elevation Capital, Peak XV Partners, 1984 Ventures, Y Combinator, and leading life sciences investors.


ContactsMedia Contact:
Dixit Suthar, Founders Office
dixit@synthiolabs.com

source ​-(BUSINESS WIRE)

• San Francisco-based fintech automates the small business lending underwriting process from weeks to minutes, enabling lenders to profitably expand access to capital for underserved small businesses
• Kaaj's platform deploys AI agents that work together to automate the entire credit analysis process
• The platform has already processed over $5 billion in small business loan applications

SAN FRANCISCO--Kaaj, an agentic AI credit intelligence platform that simplifies small business lending, today announced it has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and others.

Founded in 2024, Kaaj's mission is to expand access to affordable capital for all small businesses. Using agentic AI workflows to help lenders analyze end-to-end loan packages and create decision-ready analysis for small business lending, Kaaj reduces lender costs and accelerates decision-making.

Kaaj’s founding team combines deep AI expertise and risk experience. Utsav Shah, co-founder and CEO, spent a decade at Uber and Cruise, building AI-powered decision-making systems at scale. Shivi Sharma, co-founder and President, is an expert in credit and fraud risk, formerly of American Express, Uber, and Varo Bank.

The capital will accelerate product development and expand Kaaj's reach across the $1.7 trillion U.S. small-business lending market and the $1.3 trillion equipment finance market.

A Unique Market Opportunity: Expanding Access to Affordable Capital for Undercapitalized Small Businesses Across the U.S.

Small business formation has surged to record levels over the past two years, with U.S. small businesses now numbering more than 33 million. However, access to capital remains a critical challenge.

According to the Federal Reserve 2024 Small Business Credit Survey, approximately 50% of small business loan applicants fail to receive the full amount of capital they need, leaving businesses undercapitalized at crucial growth stages. A major reason for this gap is that for most lenders, loans under $1m are not profitable using current manual, time-intensive underwriting approaches.

To solve this, Kaaj's platform deploys AI agents that work together to automate the entire credit analysis process, from business verification and cash flow analysis to asset valuation, financial analysis, and risk assessment. What traditionally takes underwriters days of manual work across thousands of documents, Kaaj completes the work in under three minutes, delivering decision-ready analysis that integrates seamlessly into existing loan origination systems.

"Lenders face a fundamental profitability problem: it takes the same amount of time and resources to underwrite a $100,000 loan as it does a $5 million loan," said Shivi Sharma, President and co-founder of Kaaj. "This forces lenders to prioritize larger loans, leaving millions of small businesses without access to the capital they need to operate and grow. Kaaj's platform doesn't just speed things up. It fundamentally changes the economics of small business lending, making smaller loans profitable for lenders while improving the borrower experience."
The platform has already processed over $5 billion in loan applications and has a growing customer base of lenders and brokers with industry-leading companies like Amur Equipment Finance, Quality Equipment Finance, and Fundr.

Addressing Both Sides of the Small Business Lending Ecosystem

Kaaj serves both lenders and brokers, who together represent the vast majority of small business financing activity. For lenders, the platform enables profitable scaling without proportional headcount growth, allowing a team processing 500 applications monthly to handle 2,000 applications with the same staff. For brokers, Kaaj adds intelligent lender matching capabilities, routing deals to the most appropriate financing sources.

"Time kills deals in small business lending," said CEO and co-founder Utsav Shah. "When multiple lenders compete for the same quality borrowers, speed determines winners. Faster, more consistent decisions with clear data help brokers reduce administration time and focus on delivering bespoke advice and guidance for small businesses. For lenders, Kaaj speeds up the response time to minutes instead of days, demonstrably improving their approval-to-funding ratios so they don't lose quality deals to competitors."

By integrating with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho, and more, Kaaj goes live in as little as three weeks.

Consistency and Transparency in an Inconsistent Industry

Beyond speed, Kaaj addresses a critical but often overlooked problem in commercial lending: inconsistency. Through behavioral studies shadowing credit underwriters, Kaaj's team discovered that decision-making varies dramatically by factors such as time of day, workload, and day of week: an inconsistency that frustrates brokers and borrowers.

Every deal Kaaj analyzes receives the same comprehensive due diligence, regardless of external factors. This consistency improves decision quality while making the entire process more transparent and audit-ready, critical factors in today's regulatory environment. The platform's transparency is built into its architecture. Every data point, calculation, and insight is fully traceable and verifiable, ensuring lenders can demonstrate clear audit trails for regulators while maintaining full control over final lending decisions.

​Investor Backing

"Small business lending has long struggled with a fundamental economics problem, the cost to underwrite smaller loans hasn't matched the returns, leaving millions of businesses underserved," said Kanyi Maqubela, Managing Partner, Kindred Ventures. "Kaaj is solving this by fundamentally changing the unit economics of SMB lending through intelligent automation. The platform doesn't just incrementally improve efficiency; it unlocks an entirely new category of profitable lending that was previously inaccessible.”
​
"We're backing a team with the rare combination of deep AI expertise and domain knowledge in credit risk to build the infrastructure that will power the next generation of small business finance," said Jake Gibson, Founding Partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures.

"What impressed us most was Kaaj's approach to building transparent, audit-ready AI that enhances rather than replaces human judgment,” said Sheel Mohnot Co-Founder & General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures. “In an industry where consistency and compliance are paramount, this is exactly the kind of infrastructure innovation that expands access to financial services for underserved communities."

About Kaaj
Kaaj is an agentic AI credit intelligence platform that automates small business loan underwriting from application to decision-ready analysis. The San Francisco-based company integrates seamlessly with existing loan origination systems, enabling lenders and brokers to scale efficiently while maintaining consistency and transparency. Kaaj's mission is to expand access to affordable capital for all small businesses by empowering lenders with best-in-class technology.

For more information, visit https://kaaj.ai/

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source[BusinessWire]