It happened one day.
Jannae Gammage has worked with the Small Business Administration as a technology consultant, helping firms access capital through traditional lenders akin to banks and credit unions. But she couldn’t help but think there was a problem: The ways lenders and firms connect were woefully outdated, especially on the technology front.
“I’ve been in this mess, watching good companies die trying to cope with legacy workflows,” she told TechCrunch. “My real mission was to find technology that would solve this problem, but it didn’t exist. I couldn’t find anything.”
So she called an old friend, Alaia Martin, and the two of them got to work. In 2022, the duo began working on Cyphr, a Kansas City-based company aimed at making the lending process easier for lenders and small businesses. Cyphr was among the 20 finalists of the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
The product analyzes alternative data sources and small business financial patterns to help lenders make decisions about the creditworthiness of small businesses. Cyphr has undergone several iterations since its launch, but recent advances in artificial intelligence have paved the way for what the product is today. The official market premiere took place in April 2024.
“When we started, the problem we were trying to solve was, ‘How can we make underwriting smarter and faster for entrepreneurs to access capital?’” said Gammage, CEO. “We wanted a world where money flowed freely like in other industries. We came in with a borrower-centric experience, while many companies were focused on how to make it work for lenders.”
They began building LLM by using training data based on missed business owners and their company funds to help lenders make decisions about which firms to partner with.
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“We were doing it manually,” Martin, the company’s chief operating officer, said of building LLM before the latest AI update. “Even though we are an AI company, we started doing this without any help.”
Their current model is complementary to the OpenAI model that they have refined themselves.
However, recent AI updates have not only improved their product, but also made lenders more willing to work with them, Gammage said. The financial industry was already changing due to Covid-19, knowing that it had to digitize and modernize in some respects. “Now when I add this AI where they use it every day, it feels comfortable,” she said.
“If we had [gone to market] in 2022 it would definitely be harder to get buy-in just because of the fear around technology, AI and the status quo,” Gammage said.
To date, the company has raised $1 million. Gammage found the process each easy and difficult.
“Things that I thought were hard weren’t hard at all. Things that I thought were pretty easy weren’t at all,” she said. One sore point was the flow of capital: they watched others raise thousands and thousands all at once, while for them the money got here in tranches as they participated in accelerators and various pitch competitions.
“It’s very difficult to experience catalytic moments when you get cash injections this way,” she said.
Meanwhile, Martin anxious about what fundraising could be like in San Francisco for two Black women from the Midwest with non-technical backgrounds. “We are not what you think of when you think of a tech founder,” she said. But she said they didn’t have a major problem. “We have been really well received in Silicon Valley.”
“I’m so grateful that we were able to raise this amount because I know less than 1% of us can say that,” Gammage added.
The company has big plans: it is currently building a platform that will help firms find opportunities when the World Cup takes place next yr. Gammage and Martin have also been pondering about recent locations for the company, although nothing is certain.
“We’re excited about the future of the company,” Gammage said, adding that winning Disrupt’s Battlefield will hopefully help achieve those goals. “Even momentum requires money.”