It happened one day.
Jannae Gammage worked with the Small Business Administration as a technology consultant, helping businesses access capital through traditional financial institutions such as banks and credit unions. But she couldn’t help but think there was a problem. The way lenders and businesses connected was woefully outdated, especially when it came to technology.
“I was in turmoil, trying to navigate legacy workflows and watching great companies disappear,” she told TechCrunch. “My literal job was to find the technology to solve this. But it didn’t exist. I couldn’t find anything.”
So she called her old friend Alaia Martin and the two of them started working together. In 2022, the two began working on Cyphr, a Kansas City-based company focused on making the lending process easier for lenders and small businesses. Cyphr is a Top 20 finalist in Startup Battlefield, part of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
This product analyzes alternative data sources and financial patterns for small businesses to help lenders make decisions about small businesses’ creditworthiness. Cyphr has gone through several iterations since its launch, but recent advances in artificial intelligence have paved the way for today’s product. It will be officially launched on the market in April 2024.
“When we started, the problem we were trying to solve was, ‘How can we make underwriting smarter and faster to help entrepreneurs access capital?'” CEO Gammage said. “We wanted a world where money moves freely, just like in other industries. We came in with a borrower-centric experience, whereas many companies were focused on ‘how do we make it work for lenders?'”
They began building an LLM that would allow lenders to decide which companies to work with using overlooked training data based on management and their own financial health.
tech crunch event
san francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“We were doing it manually,” Martin, the company’s chief operating officer, said of building LLM before the latest AI upgrade. “We are an AI-native company, but we really started this without any help.”
Their current model is built on top of an OpenAI model that they have fine-tuned themselves.
But Gammage said the latest updates in AI not only strengthened their product, but also made lenders more willing to work with them. The financial industry knew it needed to digitize and modernize in some way, and it had already started changing due to the coronavirus. “When you add this AI, it becomes routine and comfortable,” she said.
“If we had entered the market in 2022, it would definitely have been much harder to get buy-in because of technology and AI and fear of the status quo,” Gammage said.
The company has raised $1 million so far. Gammage said the process was both easy and difficult.
“Things I thought would be hard weren’t hard. Things I thought would be easy weren’t hard at all,” she said. One disappointing aspect was the flow of funds. They watched their peers raise millions of dollars all at once, but in their case, the money came in installments as they entered accelerators and various pitch competitions.
“It’s very hard to have a catalytic moment when you’re getting an infusion of cash in that way,” she said.
Meanwhile, as two Black women from the Midwest with non-technical backgrounds, Martin was worried about how her fundraising efforts in San Francisco would fare. “We’re not what you think of when you think of technology founders,” she said. But she said there were no major problems. “It was very well received in Silicon Valley.”
“We’re so grateful to have been able to raise money because we know that less than 1% of us can say that,” Gammage added.
The company has big plans and is currently building a platform to help businesses find opportunities when the World Cup takes place next year. Gammage and Martin are also considering a new location for the company, but nothing has been finalized.
“We are excited about the future of the company,” Gammage said, adding that he hopes the victory at Disrupt’s Battlefield will help achieve these goals. “Momentum also requires money.”
To learn more about Cyphr, check out dozens of other companies, hear their pitches, and hear from guest speakers on four different stages at Disrupt in San Francisco from October 27th to 29th. Click here for more information.
