Creating The New Standard in Private Credit Ratings

We’re thrilled to announce our latest investment as we co-led AIR Platforms’ $6.1M Seed round with Lerer Hippeau after previously leading their Pre-Seed raise.

We’re excited to partner with AIR Platforms, backing their mission to build the first truly AI-native credit intelligence system - real-time, transparent, and built for the complexity of modern credit markets.

Financial Institutions are making credit decisions in an environment where the volume of available data has grown more than 10x in the last decade, yet most systems haven’t materially evolved. AIR is closing that gap. Their credit intelligence layer increases model transparency, accelerates analysis, and can reduce manual review time by 30–50%. 

The market needs infrastructure that enables participants to make faster, more accurate, and more explainable decisions. We expect AIR to become core to how modern institutions assess and price risk.

Why Credit Risk Intelligence Needs a Reckoning - and Why Now

  • Credit markets have exploded in size, structure, and complexity. Private credit alone is now a multitrillion-dollar asset class. As public and private credit blur, institutions face a flood of new borrowers, structures, and risk vectors - traditional models weren’t built for this.
  • Information overload with no standardized framework for analysis. Firms now juggle financial statements, market data, news, covenants, sector-trends and more - often manually, often inconsistently. That forces slow underwriting cycles, human error, and lack of comparability across portfolios.
  • Legacy credit-rating methods are slow, opaque, and static. Ratings from traditional agencies come with lag, limited coverage (especially in private credit), and black-box methodologies. In fast-moving markets, that lack of transparency and agility can be disastrous.‍
  • AI + modern data infrastructure changed the math. AIR uses machine-learning and generative-AI to ingest huge volumes of structured and unstructured data - financials, market signals, news, events - and deliver forward-looking, explainable, real-time credit risk scores. That allows firms to act on signal, not lag.

In short: the convergence of a huge, under-served market + data explosion + outdated workflows + AI breakthroughs makes this the moment for AIR.

The Product - Next-Gen Credit Intelligence

AIR isn’t “just another rating agency.” It offers a full-stack, AI-powered credit-intelligence platform that:

  • Produces real-time, independent credit ratings and credit risk scores for private Congratulations to the entire AIR team! You can check out their press coverage in Banking Dive. public entities. Scores reflect underlying financials, sector context, event-driven signals, and are updated as new data arrives.
  • Delivers transparency: drivers, not black boxes. For each entity, AIR surfaces the core risk factors (leverage, profitability, cash flow, sector-specific inputs), with their relative weights - so analysis is intuitive and auditable.
  • Generates automated credit memos, diligence packages, and scenario analyses. Users can quickly produce standardized, comparable credit packages - dramatically reducing manual labor, turnaround time, and error risk.
  • Provides early-warning signals and continuous monitoring. As new financials, events, or market shifts occur, AIR updates scores - giving firms foresight, not hindsight.
  • Scales across any credit universe. From publicly-traded corporates to private firms and structured credit vehicles - AIR supports broad coverage, making it “one standard across credit, leadership, and stakeholders.”

In practice: AIR turns what used to take weeks of manual modeling and subjective grading into seconds - with more rigor, consistency, and comparability across portfolios.

The Team - The Right Combination of Credit + AI + Operational Rigor

AIR was founded by a group of seasoned credit-risk and AI veterans who have each lived the pain of legacy workflows. Together, they combine domain expertise, AI-first DNA, and an uncompromising mission to bring clarity and speed to credit risk, something legacy systems have failed to deliver for decades. They most recently worked together at DataRobot before joining forces to launch AIR.

CEO Glenn Carvajal brings former experience at Moody’s, where he co-led Moody’s Analytics Research, Data & Analytics Credit Products business across the Americas, CTO Arbi Abeshi brings a deep ML/engineering background building financial infrastructure at firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and Chief AI Officer Joe Burdis is a credit-modeling veteran with a track record in AI/ML + structured finance from SAS and Deloitte. The trio worked together at DataRobot and has since reunited to build the next generation of AI-powered credit infrastructure redefining how institutions detect and manage risk.

There’s nothing better than when a deal comes together and our NYC enterprise tentacles work their magic. Glenn came to us via our friend Lindsay (who previously worked at a WB portfolio company) from their DataRobot days. We then called our Fund II founder Diego Oppenheimer - who’d worked with Joe and Arbi post-Algorithmia acquisition - for the inside scoop. And in true “small world” fashion, our portfolio company FireHydrant’s VP of Sales had teamed with Glenn back when Brian ran US East at DataRobot.

This is the NYC enterprise community at its best: fast signals from people we trust, all pointing to the same conclusion - this is a team we want to be in business with.

Why Work-Bench Is All-In

AIR sits squarely at the intersection of what we believe matters most right now to rethink enterprise workflows:

  • Mission-critical workflow. Credit risk decisions sit at the heart of institutional risk, fund allocations, and regulatory compliance - changes here ripple across entire balance sheets.
  • Manual, redundant, costly processes. Until now, underwriting and monitoring have relied on human labor, static reports, and slow review cycles. That’s inefficient, opaque, and dangerous - especially in credit markets.
  • AI + data = step-function improvement. AIR shows that when you apply modern ML + data infrastructure, you don’t just get slight gains - you transform the workflow.
  • Real demand and early validation. With early customers and design partners across CLOs, credit funds, institutional investors, banks, and Fortune 500 companies, AIR is already proving its product-market fit.

We believe AIR has the potential to become the standard credit-intelligence layer for institutions, replacing legacy ratings and manual workflows with an AI-first, audit-ready, scalable infrastructure.

If you’re an investor, credit manager, or risk team relying on spreadsheet-based diligence or opaque rating agencies - the future is here.

Welcome to the Work-Bench family, AIR. Looking forward to building the future of credit intelligence together. ⚡️

Congratulations to the entire AIR team! You can check out their press coverage in Banking Dive.