AIR, the AI-powered credit intelligence platform that delivers continuous, bias-free credit ratings for public and private credit, announced a $6.1 million seed round co-led by Work-Bench Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.
Built by industry veterans from Moody’s, DataRobot, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, AIR replaces century-old, legacy credit ratings with an autonomous, AI-powered system that evaluates every company’s financial health, whether it’s public or private, every single day.
With private credit now exceeding $2 trillion globally, the need for real-time, objective insight has never been greater. For more than 100 years, credit ratings have been shaped by antiquated methodologies and static statistical models, making the process subjective, backward-looking, and slow to react. AIR changes that. Powered by advanced AI trained on decades of financial and alternative data, the platform continuously detects early warning signs and re-rates companies in real time, giving investors, banks, and asset managers a transparent, bias free view of risk.
“Legacy credit rating approaches rely on manual methodologies that are slow and reactive, while quantitative models often become outdated the moment they go into production,” said Glenn Carvajal, Co-Founder and CEO of AIR. “You compound this with bias embedded in almost every framework, and you have the same conditions that led to the financial crisis, with flawed ratings, poor underwriting, and systemic blind spots. We built AIR to supercharge an analyst’s ability to not miss anything, the equivalent of an Iron Man suit that is always on, adaptive, and constantly learning. What we have developed is an intelligent framework that keeps getting better with every signal, allowing institutions to detect and understand credit risk in real time, not months later.”
AIR’s technology has already delivered results. When First Brands, a major auto parts manufacturer, defaulted in September, one of AIR’s customers had been alerted to their credit deterioration. AIR instantly detected the risk and independently assigned a rating roughly aligned with the lower end of the speculative grade spectrum, comparable to a level between CCC to CC, well before the market caught on. Those early signals proved accurate, validating AIR’s ability to surface risks missed from legacy approaches or models.
The company has quickly gained traction with financial institutions managing over $4 trillion in assets, including CLOs, BDCs, Banks, Pension Funds, and Fortune 500 enterprises including regulatory bodies. Customers are now using AIR for early warning, sensitivity analysis and to stress-test portfolios, meet compliance standards, and to modernize their credit infrastructure with a system that never stops adapting.
“From the beginning, we believed this team had what it takes to change an industry,” said Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench Ventures. “They were on the front lines during the financial crisis, working within major financial institutions and ratings agencies that saw firsthand the challenges and breakdowns in credit assessment. They understand the root causes of credit failure and are proven experts in building real AI, not science projects, having helped scale a leading AI unicorn. The traction the AIR team is experiencing from leading financial institution customers has been extraordinary, and what they have accomplished since founding AIR is nothing short of unprecedented.”
“AIR is tackling one of the most entrenched and least modernized corners of financial infrastructure,” said Andrea Hippeau, Partner at Lerer Hippeau. “The existing credit rating system was built for another era, one where information moved slowly and opinions carried more weight than data. AIR flips that model on its head and gives credit and risk teams superpowers: continuous ratings, full transparency, and the ability to act before anyone else. It’s a complete rethinking of how institutional risk is measured, managed, and communicated. We’re thrilled to be co-leading this round and backing a team that’s redefining the future of credit.”
With the new funding, AIR will continue investing in product innovation, talent, and strategic partnerships to accelerate its mission of redefining how institutions understand and manage credit risk.
