Coris Secures $3.7M for AI Revolution in SMB Risk Management
California’s fintech innovator, Coris, has secured $3.7 million in initial funding to expand its AI-driven risk management solution. This initiative is aimed at modernizing outdated risk evaluation methods employed by numerous financial institutions for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
This funding round was led jointly by renowned AI investment firm Lux Capital and fintech expert Exponent Capital, with contributions from the prestigious accelerator Y Combinator, Blank Ventures, and a group of experienced fintech entrepreneurs.
Utilizing advanced language models, Coris efficiently processes unstructured information, providing key insights for functions such as automated insurance underwriting. Its latest innovation, CorShield, enhances the security of SMEs during the onboarding process by verifying applicant information through a variety of online sources to prevent fraud through impersonation.
Vinodh Poyyapakkam, Coris’s CEO, shared with VentureBeat the pressing demand for AI-integrated risk management software tailored for SMEs, highlighting the desire for businesses to embed risk management directly into their platforms.
The newly acquired funds will fast-track the launch of Coris’s pioneering products, including CorShield, an innovative fraud detection model for SMEs, and an all-encompassing business verification tool, transforming the traditional and manual methods of SME risk evaluation.
Addressing the considerable challenge posed by the fragmented and unstructured data of over 400 million SMEs globally, Coris utilizes large language models to provide detailed risk analyses, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy over traditional methods.
Coris’s platform offers a strategic overhaul in risk management, simplifying the onboarding and ongoing monitoring with tools like CorShield, which verifies SMB identities by cross-referencing data from multiple sources to prevent fraud.
Moreover, Coris’s MerchantProfiler delivers real-time business verifications and classifications in 46 countries, leveraging GPT-4 technology, which is essential for fintechs and software companies aiming for global expansion and compliance.
Additionally, Coris’s Fuzio, a centralized risk management solution, allows teams to automate risk evaluations, tailor rules, and act on insights from a unified data source.
Coris’s impact is already evident, with over 150,000 SMEs streamlined for verification and a database covering over 330 million businesses globally. Clients, including Mindbody, have experienced a fivefold increase in SME onboarding speed, halved operational expenses, and an 80% reduction in manual tasks.
The market potential is vast, with around 30 million SMEs in the U.S. alone. The post-COVID surge in startups and the growing trend of embedded finance have increased the demand for automated, streamlined underwriting processes. Traditional firms have been slow to adopt new technologies like natural language processing.
Grace Isford, a partner at Lux Capital, commented to VentureBeat on the significant untapped potential of unstructured online data and Coris’s capability to manage this data on a large scale.
With a team comprising former risk and fraud experts from leading companies like PayPal and eBay, Coris is poised for growth, aiming to revolutionize risk management with AI and alternative data, targeting a multibillion-dollar market in reducing SME risk.
