Tag: funding stages

Ultrahuman makes health-tracking wearables and metabolic health tools built around a smart ring, blood testing, glucose monitoring, and connected home sensors.

Now the Ultrahuman smart ring story has a lot more money behind it. The Bengaluru company has closed a Series C round of around ₹400 crore, or about $48 million. The problem it’s trying to solve is simple enough: health data is scattered, hard to interpret, and too clunky for most people to use every day. Founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal, Ultrahuman is trying to turn that mess into a single always-on health stack — and this round comes just as it tries to get back into the US after a bruising patent fight with Oura.

One wrinkle still hangs over the deal. One person said Premji Invest led the round, but Kumar pushed back and said Ultrahuman has “not raised from Premji,” then declined to say more. It tells you this financing is real, but some cap-table details still aren’t fully settled in public.

What is the Ultrahuman smart ring and how does it work?

The short version: Ring PRO is Ultrahuman’s third-generation health-tracking ring. It collects passive biometric data through the ring, syncs that data through the app, and translates it into scores, prompts, and longer-term guidance. It tracks sleep, recovery, movement, stress, heart rhythm and other markers. Then it layers those signals into features like Sleep Index, Dynamic Recovery, Stress Rhythm, Movement Index, and Ultra Age.

What makes the product more interesting now is that it’s no longer just a ring. If a user is inside the wider Ultrahuman system, Jade — the company’s new biointelligence layer — can combine ring data with 120+ Blood Vision biomarkers, M1 CGM glucose trends, and data from Ultrahuman Home. That means the user isn’t stuck hopping between dashboards and guessing what matters. They can ask natural-language questions and get recommendations back.

The hardware changes are pretty concrete too. Ring PRO has up to 15 days of battery life and stores up to 250 days of data on the ring itself. It uses a redesigned heart-rate sensing architecture and runs on an upgraded dual-core processor with on-chip machine learning. The new PRO Charger adds up to 45 days of extra battery life and stores up to a year of ring data. It also supports Qi charging and includes a “Find My Case” feature.

And that’s really the before-and-after pitch. Before, serious health nerds had to piece together sleep data, heart metrics, blood markers, and glucose trends from separate products. After, Ultrahuman wants one ring-led system to do the stitching. Ambitious? Yes. But it’s a real product thesis, not vague wellness branding.

Who founded Ultrahuman and how did the company get here?

The founding story

Ultrahuman was started in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal in Bengaluru. The company first built around metabolic health and performance tracking, then expanded into hardware and a broader consumer health platform. That arc matters because Ultrahuman didn’t begin as a fashion-first wearable brand. It began with biomarker-heavy health optimization, and the ring became the most scalable way to package that idea.

Why Mohit Kumar had market fit

Kumar wasn’t new to building fast-moving consumer tech companies. Before Ultrahuman, he was chief operations officer of Zomato’s food delivery business until 2019, and before that he co-founded Runnr with Singhal — a last-mile and food delivery startup that later folded into Zomato in 2017. He’s also a graduate of PES Institute of Technology in Bengaluru. That doesn’t automatically make someone a wearable-tech founder. But it does mean Kumar had already lived through scale, operations, logistics, and a startup exit before trying to build hardware.

What Ultrahuman has shipped so far

Ultrahuman has been steadily widening the product set. Ring Air launched in 2022. Ring PRO is positioned as the performance-oriented upgrade, while Ring Air stays in the lineup for people who care more about comfort and lighter wear. Kumar’s own summary was blunt: Pro is for performance with 15-day battery life, Air is for comfort with 5-6 day battery life. Ring PRO is already on sale in India, Europe, the UAE, and Australia. The company has also expanded into blood testing and home health devices. That helps explain why its product roadmap now stretches beyond rings.

The Series C and the US reset

This new round lands at a very specific moment. Ultrahuman has already raised more than $60 million in equity from Rainmatter Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures, Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, and angel investor Deepinder Goyal. In November 2025, it also took ₹100 crore in venture debt from Alteria Capital. The fresh Series C money is expected to fund 3 things: a US return with the redesigned Ring PRO, expansion into new geographies, and new wearables — including a wristband-style product and new home lines.

That US return isn’t just a sales push. It’s a legal comeback. In August 2025, the US International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Oura in a patent case involving Ultrahuman and RingConn, then exclusion and cease-and-desist orders took effect on October 21, 2025, blocking imports and sales tied to the older Ring Air design. The new Ring PRO has been redesigned specifically to avoid the battery-integration and form-factor issues at the heart of that dispute, and The CapTable reported that Ultrahuman has now received approval to bring the redesigned ring back to the US.

Where it sits against Oura, RingConn, and the old alternatives

Oura is still the company to beat. It raised a $200 million Series D in November 2024 at a $5.2 billion valuation, and by May 2024 it had sold more than 2.5 million rings. That’s the scale benchmark Ultrahuman is chasing. RingConn is another direct smart-ring competitor, and it was dragged into the same patent fight. Then there are the older alternatives — smartwatches and fitness bands. They offer broader notifications and screens but still lose on comfort, sleep wearability, and passive data capture for a lot of users.

Ultrahuman’s differentiation is pretty clear. It’s pushing battery life and a performance-first ring. It also wants deeper data integration across glucose, blood and home signals, plus a more complete health-data layer rather than just a hardware accessory. Investors aren’t just betting on a ring. They’re betting that a ring can become the entry point into a broader personal-health subscription and device stack.

Why does Ultrahuman smart ring funding matter right now?

Because this round isn’t about survival. It’s about whether Ultrahuman can turn a legal setback into a product reset.

If Ring Air had stayed blocked in the US with no clear redesign path, the company’s global ambitions would’ve looked a lot thinner. The US is still the most important premium wearables market for category-defining brands, especially in health tracking. Getting Ring PRO through that bottleneck gives Ultrahuman a second shot at the one market where Oura already has brand gravity, distribution muscle, and consumer familiarity.

There’s also a roadmap signal buried in the use-of-funds plan. A wristband form factor and new home lines suggest Ultrahuman doesn’t want to be trapped inside a single-device story. That’s smart. Hardware categories can go cold fast. A multi-device health stack is harder to build, but it also gives the company more shots.

And honestly, that’s probably what investors are buying here. Not just a prettier ring. A wider platform.

How big is the market for an Ultrahuman smart ring?

The category is no longer niche. MarketsandMarkets estimates the North America wearable technology market will grow from $34.1 billion in 2025 to $69.1 billion by 2030, a 15.2% CAGR. Smart rings are still a small slice of that total, but they sit inside one of the fastest-moving parts of consumer health tech: passive, always-on, lower-friction monitoring.

That timing helps Ultrahuman. Consumers have gotten a lot more comfortable with continuous health data. They also want devices that don’t feel like tiny smartphones strapped to their bodies. That’s why screenless wearables are getting real attention now — less distraction, more wear time, better sleep tracking, and fewer charging headaches when the hardware is done right.

AI is part of the timing too. People don’t just want more data anymore. They want interpretation. Jade is Ultrahuman’s answer to that shift, and Oura has already shown there’s real appetite for smart rings. So the market tailwind is real. But tailwinds don’t guarantee a win. Execution does.

Ultrahuman’s next chapter comes down to one thing: can it turn the Ultrahuman smart ring from a strong alternative into a category leader with real US momentum? The funding gives it the chance. The redesigned Ring PRO gives it the opening. What to watch next is simple — whether the US relaunch sticks, and whether the company can make that wider health stack feel indispensable instead of overbuilt.

Read how Velmenni Li-Fi Raises ₹30 Cr for Defense Push and why optical wireless is emerging as a serious alternative to traditional telecom infrastructure.

FAQ

What is Ultrahuman raising in its latest funding round?

Ultrahuman has closed a Series C round of around ₹400 crore, or roughly $48 million. One source said Premji Invest led the round, but Mohit Kumar publicly denied that specific detail and said the company had “not raised from Premji.”

How does Ultrahuman Ring PRO differ from Ring Air?

Ring PRO is the higher-performance model, with up to 15 days of battery life, more computing power, and a redesigned architecture aimed at more durable health tracking. Ring Air, which launched in 2022, stays positioned as the lighter and more comfort-first option with about 5-6 days of battery life.

Who founded Ultrahuman?

Ultrahuman was founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal. Before that, the pair had already built Runnr, and Kumar later ran delivery operations at Zomato until 2019 — which gave him a pretty unusual mix of startup and scale-execution experience for a hardware founder.

Is the smart ring market big enough for Ultrahuman to matter? 

Yes — if the company executes well. North America’s wearable-tech market alone is projected to grow from $34.1 billion in 2025 to $69.1 billion by 2030, and Oura has already sold more than 2.5 million rings, which shows consumer demand for the form factor is real rather than experimental.

Velmenni builds light-based wireless communication systems for telecom, enterprise, and defense networks. The New Delhi startup has raised ₹30 Cr in a pre-Series A round led by pi Ventures, with MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh and Apekso joining in, as it tries to turn Velmenni Li-Fi from a deeptech promise into a bigger commercial business. It’s chasing a clear problem: a lot of last-mile and backhaul links are still too slow, too expensive, or too awkward to build with fiber or radio. Founded in 2014 by Deepak Solanki, Velmenni is betting that optical wireless links can fix that in places where conventional telecom infrastructure struggles.

What does Velmenni Li-Fi actually do?

At the product level, Velmenni sells optical wireless connectivity. Indoors, its Li-Fi setup takes data from a router over PoE or Ethernet and pushes that data to a Li-Fi access point attached to LED lighting. It then encodes and modulates the signal through light. A dongle connected to the user device decodes that signal and handles the uplink using near-infrared LEDs, which makes the connection bidirectional rather than just a one-way demo.

That matters. This isn’t just “internet through a bulb” marketing. Velmenni’s indoor system is built around specific enterprise features: up to 1 Gbps speeds and latency in the 1–3 ms range. It also offers plug-and-play hardware and line-of-sight security that keeps light-based traffic from leaking through walls the way radio can. The company frames Li-Fi as interference-free for places where electromagnetic noise is a real operational headache.

Outdoors, the company goes after a different job. Its light communication backhaul product is designed for point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links, with 1 Gbps throughput at 1 km and latency around 1–2 ms. It uses pole-mounted equipment meant to be deployed faster than trenching cable. That makes it more like telecom infrastructure than a niche lighting add-on.

The customer workflow is pretty straightforward. Instead of digging for fiber or fighting for more spectrum, a telecom operator, factory, campus, harbor, or defense site can mount optical gear where it needs the link and align it. Then it can bring bandwidth online with less civil work. That’s why Velmenni talks about both Li-Fi and FSO rather than treating them as the same thing—they solve different connection problems inside the same optical wireless stack.

Who built Velmenni Li-Fi and what has it shipped?

The founding story and founder fit

Velmenni was founded in 2014, and Solanki still leads it as founder and CEO. His background is in electronics and communication engineering, and he’d been focused on Li-Fi research before the company’s commercial push took shape. He became interested in Li-Fi in 2011, then pushed the idea from an R&D effort into a product company. He also worked with the Airbus accelerator, which gave the startup early validation outside India.

There’s also a business-side counterpart here. Velmenni lists Ujjwal Minocha as cofounder and COO, running business, strategy, sales, and marketing. His background is less lab-heavy and more commercial. That matters because this kind of company doesn’t win on patents alone—it wins when someone can actually sell hard tech into long procurement cycles.

The early traction is unusually concrete

Here’s where Velmenni gets more interesting than a lot of optical wireless startups. It has already done more than 50 deployments across India, Southeast Asia, and with tier I mobile network operators in the US. One of the biggest proof points is a multi-million-dollar Indian defense contract to deploy FSO systems across Indian submarines for harbor connectivity. Another is a private 5G network installed at GMR’s thermal power plant in Odisha, where the company maintained 99.999% availability for more than 18 months in tropical conditions.

Those aren’t soft signals. Neither is the compliance story. Velmenni has secured CE certification in Europe and is waiting for FCC clearance in the US. It has also built an international patent portfolio backed by grants from the Department of Telecommunications and India’s defense ministry.

The round, the rivals, and where Velmenni sits

The new round brings in ₹30 Cr, or about $3.3 Mn, at the pre-Series A stage. pi Ventures led it. MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh and Apekso also participated. Velmenni plans to use the money to commercialize its FSO and Li-Fi telecom products. It also plans to build more solutions for defense and enterprise buyers and push into more international markets. For pi Ventures, which has explicitly positioned Fund II around seed-to-Series A deeptech bets, the fit is obvious.

Competition is real, even if this market is still early. Trackers place Velmenni in a global field that includes pureLiFi, Oledcomm, VLNComm, Signify, Lucibel, and LiFiComm. But most of the incumbent alternatives Velmenni is really selling against aren’t other Li-Fi startups. They’re fiber trenching, licensed spectrum, and millimeter-wave links. Velmenni’s pitch is that light-based backhaul can be cheaper and faster to deploy in places where those options are messy, slow, or overkill.

Solanki put the differentiation plainly: Velmenni offers an “all-weather tested, 100% Made in India design” with “10Gbps+ seamless connectivity” across 1–25 km. That’s ambitious. But it also explains why investors are backing it—the company isn’t just selling a lab demo. It’s selling a hardware stack with telecom and defense use cases attached.

Why does this Velmenni funding round matter?

This round matters because it isn’t being framed as pure R&D money. Velmenni is using it to commercialize products that already exist, not to begin from scratch. That usually means manufacturing, deployment support, sales capacity, and product hardening are now just as important as the underlying optics.

For customers, that’s a big shift. A telecom buyer or defense user doesn’t care that a system worked once in a pilot. They care whether it can be installed repeatedly and serviced quickly. They also care whether it can be procured without drama. Velmenni now has the kind of capital that can help bridge that ugly middle stage between “ impressive technology”‘ and “‘reliable vendor”.

For the category, this is a useful signal. Optical wireless has been talked about for years as a secure, high-capacity alternative to RF-heavy networks. The hard part was always commercial adoption. A funded company with real deployments, defense validation, and an enterprise roadmap has a better shot at pushing the category out of the prototype bucket.

How big is the Li-Fi and optical wireless market?

The market tailwind is substantial. Grand View Research projects the global light fidelity market will reach $7.76 Bn by 2030, growing at a 51.0% CAGR from 2023 to 2030. The same forecast flags aerospace and defense as a meaningful end-use segment. It also expects Asia Pacific to be one of the fastest-growing regions.

India gives that story a local backbone. Since 5G launched in 2022, the country has built the world’s second-largest 5G user base, with 40 Cr subscribers by early 2026 and 4.69 lakh base stations. That doesn’t automatically make Li-Fi mainstream. But it does create more pressure for dense, fast, secure backhaul and last-mile links in places where radio isn’t ideal.

The competitive set also shows this is now a real market, not a science fair project. Grand View’s market data lists pureLiFi, Oledcomm, VLNComm, Signify, and Velmenni among notable players, while its regional outlook expects Asia Pacific light fidelity revenue to reach about $1.38 Bn by 2030. Behind this round is a broader shift: more security-sensitive environments and more connected industrial sites. There’s also more willingness to use optical wireless where line-of-sight constraints are acceptable.

Will Velmenni Li-Fi break out from here?

Velmenni has something a lot of deeptech startups never get—deployment history in actual operating environments, not just decks and pilots. That gives it credibility. But credibility isn’t scale.

What matters next for Velmenni Li-Fi is whether those early submarine, industrial, and telecom wins turn into repeatable multi-site rollouts.

Read how Fuse Raises $25M for AI Loan Origination System and why lenders are looking to replace legacy LOS platforms with AI-driven infrastructure.

FAQ

What funding did Velmenni raise? 

Velmenni raised ₹30 Cr, or about $3.3 Mn, in a pre-Series A round. pi Ventures led the investment, and MountTech Growth Fund – Kavachh plus Apekso also participated. The company plans to use the capital to commercialize its FSO and Li-Fi telecom products and expand with defense and enterprise customers.

How does Velmenni’s Li-Fi technology work?

It works by moving data through light instead of radio. Velmenni’s indoor setup sends router data over Ethernet to a Li-Fi access point attached to LEDs. A dongle on the device decodes the light signal and handles the uplink through near-infrared LEDs, while its outdoor systems use optical links for backhaul.

Who founded Velmenni?

Deepak Solanki founded Velmenni in 2014 and serves as CEO. He comes from an electronics and communication engineering background and had been working on Li-Fi for years before the company scaled. Velmenni also lists Ujjwal Minocha as cofounder and COO, leading the commercial side.

Is Velmenni a Li-Fi company or a telecom infrastructure startup? 

It’s both. Velmenni sits in the Li-Fi and optical wireless category, but the business it’s building looks a lot like telecom infrastructure for high-speed backhaul, last-mile connectivity, private 5G environments, and secure defense networks.

Fuse builds an AI loan origination system for credit unions, banks, and other lenders. The New York startup has closed a $25 million Series A led by Footwork, with Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures also backing the round, as it tries to replace the slow, contract-heavy loan software that still runs a lot of consumer lending. Founded in 2020 by Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa, the company spent its first years on an automotive lending startup before pivoting in 2023 toward loan origination infrastructure. That shift matters because the LOS isn’t some side tool. It’s the core operating system behind application intake, underwriting, approval, and disbursement.

What is Fuse’s AI loan origination system?

Fuse’s AI loan origination system is a modern LOS and account-opening stack for lenders that want to replace patchwork workflows with one configurable system. A borrower starts in Fuse’s application portal and submits information through a mobile-friendly flow. They can move between online and branch channels without starting over. On the lender side, staff work from a tailored internal agent portal. Business teams get a no-code decision engine and reporting tools. There’s also an integrations marketplace tied to more than 200 external systems.

The more interesting part is the AI layer. Fuse has named agents for different jobs: an AI Loan Officer to guide applicants and an AI Underwriter to recommend and evaluate rules. It also has an AI Funder that auto-processes more than 90% of documentation for fraud and accuracy checks. The AI Configurator explains automation results and suggests new rules based on override behavior. That’s more concrete than the usual “we use AI across the workflow” line startups hide behind.

For credit unions, Fuse bakes account opening and membership into the loan flow itself. That means one application instead of separate portals. Less re-keying. It also means cleaner handoffs when a member starts online and finishes in-branch, or the other way around. Fuse supports direct and indirect lending across consumer and SMB products. Smaller institutions usually don’t want a different tool for every loan type.

What manual work disappears? A lot of the ugly stuff. Fuse pushes automation into document reading and fraud verification. It also handles underwriting logic, contract generation, document validation, and system integrations. The company promises fast deployment terms, including custom integrations built in under 1 month and biweekly automation coaching. That kind of contract-level implementation promise is an aggressive sales move. LOS migrations are usually painful.

Who founded Fuse and why did it pivot in 2023?

The founding story

Fuse was founded in 2020 by Klaric and Escapa, who met 5 years earlier as classmates at Harvard Business School. Klaric, a Bolivian native, and Escapa, a Spanish immigrant, originally spent 3 years building an automotive lending startup. In 2023, they decided the bigger opportunity wasn’t another lending product at the edge of the stack. It was the stack itself. So they pivoted into the LOS, the system lenders rely on as their source of record.

Why these founders make sense here

Klaric’s background is unusually finance-heavy for a founder selling infrastructure into lenders. Before Fuse, he worked on Wall Street and in investing roles tied to tech and business services, with stops at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Crescent Capital Group, and H.I.G. Capital. That matters because selling core lending software isn’t just a product problem. It’s also a credibility problem. Buyers want founders who understand credit, operations, and risk.

Escapa brings the operator side. He leads technology and innovation at Fuse and came in as a second-time founder. Before this, he co-founded travel startup Noken, which raised $7 million from Bessemer and Primary, and earlier worked at Turo on growth marketing with a $1.7 million annual budget. He also spent time at McKinsey. Put those résumés together and you get a specific founder-market fit: one co-founder with deep finance exposure, the other with startup product and scaling experience.

Traction, funding, and the rescue fund

The early signals are real. Fuse has more than 100 customers. Now it has $25 million in fresh Series A capital, with Footwork leading and Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures participating.

Fuse is also doing something pretty blunt to win over credit unions: it has set aside a $5 million “rescue fund” to give the first 50 qualifying institutions free access to Fuse until their current legacy contracts expire. Klaric says, “it’s not just a marketing gimmick,” arguing that a lot of credit unions simply can’t afford to break old LOS contracts early.

How Fuse is positioning against incumbents and newer rivals

The incumbent targets are clear: nCino and MeridianLink. Both already sell cloud-based consumer lending and origination software to banks and credit unions, and both pitch streamlined workflows, automation, and digital borrower experiences. Fuse isn’t inventing the category. It’s trying to win by saying legacy platforms are too slow to implement and too rigid to configure. They’re also too expensive to switch into or out of.

Then there are newer challengers. Casca is building an AI-native loan origination platform for SBA lenders and FDIC-insured banks, with deep SBA workflow features like E-Tran integration, and it raised $29 million in 2025. Glide, meanwhile, leans hard into mobile-first account opening and loan origination for credit unions and banks, including a 2-minute application flow. Fuse’s answer is breadth: one platform across consumer, SMB, indirect lending, and account opening. It also offers automation, 200+ integrations, membership built into lending flows, and implementation guarantees written into the contract.

Why does this AI loan origination system funding round matter?

This round matters because Fuse isn’t selling a nice-to-have workflow layer. It’s going after the software category lenders are least eager to replace. Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder and general partner at Footwork, told TechCrunch he backed Fuse because there are more than 4,000 credit unions in the U.S. and their technology is badly overdue for an overhaul. He also compared the LOS to an ERP or CRM: mission-critical, deeply embedded, and historically painful to swap.

That’s why the rescue fund is clever. The biggest blocker to adoption often isn’t product quality. It’s timing. Credit unions get trapped in long contracts, and even when leadership wants newer AI tools, ripping out the core system midstream can be financially dumb. Fuse is trying to buy its way through that bottleneck. Not with discounts alone, but by carrying some of the switching pain itself.

There’s a second signal here. Investors aren’t just betting that lenders want AI. They’re betting lenders want AI wrapped inside a system they can deploy. That’s a more mature thesis. Fancy copilots are easy to demo. Replacing operational plumbing is hard. If Fuse can do that faster than legacy vendors, this round will look smart. If it can’t, $25 million disappears fast.

How big is the digital lending and loan origination market?

The broader market is big enough to make the bet make sense. Grand View Research pegs the U.S. digital lending platform market at $2.42 billion in 2024 and projects it will reach $9.58 billion by 2030, which implies a 26.3% CAGR from 2025 through 2030. That’s fast growth by normal B2B software standards.

Global figures tell a similar story, even if the growth assumptions are a bit less aggressive. IMARC values the worldwide digital lending platform market at $13.0 billion in 2024 and forecasts $39.8 billion by 2033. It says loan origination is the largest product segment inside that market, which lines up with where startups like Fuse, Casca, and Glide are aiming.

Why now? Because lenders finally have enough pressure from both sides. Consumers expect fast, app-like borrowing. Regulators and risk teams still expect tight controls and auditability. Financial institutions want automation that cuts operating costs without forcing them into a multi-year IT project. That combination is why LOS software is getting another look after years of being treated like untouchable back-office infrastructure.

Can Fuse become the AI loan origination system credit unions want?

Fuse is going after one of the hardest software categories in fintech, which is why this story is interesting. An AI loan origination system sounds flashy, but the real test is less glamorous: implementation speed, contract conversions, and whether credit unions trust the company enough to move core workflows onto it. Watch the rescue fund. Watch customer wins against MeridianLink and nCino. Watch whether Fuse can turn “AI-native” from a pitch into a real migration wave.

Read how Neo Group became a unicorn with a ₹500 crore raise and why its advisory-plus-tech model is gaining traction among India’s wealthy investors.

FAQ

What funding did Fuse raise? 

Fuse raised a $25 million Series A. Footwork led the round, and Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures also participated. The financing comes as Fuse tries to sell its platform to credit unions and other lenders that are still running older loan origination systems.

How does Fuse’s AI loan origination system work? 

It combines borrower intake, internal lender workflows, decisioning, integrations, and account opening into one platform. Borrowers use a mobile-friendly application flow. Staff work inside a configurable agent portal. AI agents help with application guidance, underwriting recommendations, document checks, and automation setup. Fuse also supports more than 200 integrations and lets customers move between online and branch channels without restarting the process.

Who are the founders of Fuse? 

Fuse was founded in 2020 by Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa, who met at Harvard Business School. Klaric came out of Wall Street and investing roles, while Escapa had already built and sold in startup and product-heavy environments, including Noken, Turo, and McKinsey. That mix helps because selling core lending infrastructure takes both financial credibility and product discipline.

Why is loan origination software attracting so much attention now? 

Because the category sits right at the intersection of cost pressure and AI adoption. In the U.S., the digital lending platform market is projected to grow from $2.42 billion in 2024 to $9.58 billion by 2030, and globally the market is forecast to reach $39.8 billion by 2033. Loan origination is the biggest segment inside that shift, which is why investors are backing startups that promise to modernize the lending system of record instead of just layering on a chatbot.