Martini.ai Closes $6 Million Seed Round to Leverage AI to Transform Private and Public Corporate Credit Monitoring and Evaluation

Neotribe Leads Initial Round of Investment; Martini.ai Launches NeuRatings Platform for Corporate Lenders to Deliver Real-Time Credit Scores and Spreads on over 700,000 Private Companies

Martini.ai, revolutionizing the corporate credit market for private companies through the power of AI, announced that it has raised $6 million in seed funding to reimagine how $10 trillion in corporate credit is evaluated and monitored. The round was led by Neotribe with participation from Rocketship.vc. Martini.ai will use the funding to support the commercial launch and continued development of the company’s breakthrough NeuRatings solution credit rating system for private companies.

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Martini.ai was founded by repeat entrepreneurs Rajiv Bhat, who started Mertado, and Rohit Singh, who founded the quantitative hedge fund Tech Square Trading. They identified an opportunity to apply machine learning and quantitative technologies to transform the pricing of illiquid assets such as corporate bonds and credit spreads for private companies. Traditional methods of monitoring company credit risk rely heavily on financial statements, which often contain data up to six months old that does not accurately represent the current situation and consequently requires months of follow-up for financials from borrowers. With the rise of black swan events in a more interconnected world, particularly in the last three years, it has become more critical than ever to understand the default risk associated with companies.

“The use of ratings for allocating corporate debt has historically only been privy to very large corporations,” said Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri, founder and managing director, Neotribe. “For everyone else, either debt is not available, or it comes with a steep price, with an outdated error-prone manual approach. So, how do you underwrite corporate debt? By applying AI to market and historical operational data, Martini is now able to democratize corporate debt ratings, making them available to virtually every public company and a vast majority of private ones too.”

Martini.ai NeuRatings platform delivers significant improvements for corporate lenders to credit risk monitoring, providing real-time credit scores and spreads on over 700,000 private companies, a capability no other solution can match. NeuRatings leverages AI to combine a knowledge graph with real-time monitoring of equity and credit markets to quickly propagate the impact of changes on credit risk. It utilizes Generative AI by way of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate real-time risk reports from information in corporate bond and loan trading data, news, supply chain and corporate relationships, equity market data, traffic, and ownership that may have been previously overlooked.

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By combining these diverse sources of data, NeuRatings provides more accurate and timely insights into default risk for both public and private companies. In addition, by monitoring the impact of macroeconomic indicators such as inflation and the price of oil on private credit portfolios, NeuRatings provides credit portfolio managers with the critical information necessary to protect their portfolios against potential financial losses by offloading or repricing risky debt.

“Corporate risk has fundamentally changed since March 2020 as there are more shocks hitting interconnected ecosystems that have made companies a lot more vulnerable,” said Rajiv Bhat, co-founder and CEO, Martini.ai. “At the same time, the amount of available data coupled with breakthrough AI technologies have given us a much better way to determine corporate risk in real-time. We’re thrilled that Neotribe and Rocketship.vc have invested in Martini.ai and shown confidence in us. With the launch of NeuRatings, we aim to assist lenders in efficiently managing their credit portfolios while also supporting businesses in a rapidly evolving market.”

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