Casca AI: Building an AI Native Loan Origination Platform

This case follows Stanford GSB graduate Lukas Haffer and cofounder Isaiah Williams as they build Casca AI, an AI-native loan origination platform that tackles the complexity of U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) lending. It traces Casca’s journey from problem validation at Y Combinator, through a derailed “platform” partnership in Europe, to a narrow but high-impact wedge in SBA lending with community bank Havenbank that dramatically improved application conversion and processing times for small business borrowers. As Casca “ladders up” to win Birchstone Bank, the country’s largest SBA lender, Haffer confronts intertwined strategic decisions: whether to deepen into a system-of-record SBA platform or broaden horizontally across loan types, and whether to accept a preemptive Series A from bank-backed Canapi Ventures and customer-investors or pursue top-tier Silicon Valley VCs.