North Carolina

How a Community-Focused Fintech is Using Gemini Models to Make Capital More Accessible for Small Businesses

An interview with Bernard Worthy, a Google for Startups alum, co-founder and CEO of LoanWell, a fintech company based in Durham, North Carolina.

Four images of Bernard Worthy, a Google for Startups alum, co-founder and CEO of LoanWell, a fintech company based in Durham, North Carolina.
3 min read

Growing up as third-generation entrepreneurs, Justin and I understood the grit required of Main Street business owners—the kind of painting, plumbing, and farming companies that are the backbone of America. We knew firsthand the financial vulnerabilities these businesses faced. This shared heritage is an important anchor for us and why we’re so committed to what we’re doing now with LoanWell.

Our paths converged as cofounders in 2017. We met and became friends years earlier when we were working on separate startups at a local startup space and then were brought together at a retreat, where we explored this concept of tradition and innovation—building upon the past while embracing progress—which resonated as we explored how to better support small businesses.

Justin had previously worked abroad, where he was doing really cool microfinance work, and I was eager to build tech for my community after finishing business school and a coding boot camp. We asked ourselves, how could we leverage overseas microfinance models and new U.S. tech, where we have more access to APIs and all this protected, connected data, to create more affordable capital? What does that look like, and who could we partner with?

We ultimately discovered Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), a lending community that’s particularly strong here in Durham, North Carolina. These are banks, credit unions, and loan funds that leverage federal and philanthropic capital for lower-cost lending in underserved areas. We saw that despite their crucial community work, they often lacked the tech, data, and automation of large lenders. Our aim was to bridge this gap, not to replace this beautiful human connection but to automate the backend, freeing lenders to focus on relationships.

We built an automated lending platform that helps community lenders deploy capital more efficiently, automating applications, reminders, and using Google’s AI for preliminary decisions. This enables small teams to significantly increase their capacity, reviewing tens of hundreds of applications in a week.

Gemini is revolutionizing underwriting, essentially the process of evaluating risk before taking on a financial commitment, which has typically been an incredibly time-intensive process. For CDFIs, a "one size fits all" approach doesn't work; each deal is unique. Gemini now lets us automatically process anonymized documents in a highly secure environment and apply sophisticated, rules-based decisions based on a lender's specific credit policy, even handling complex exceptions that don't always logically make sense.

Bernard Worthy, co-founder and CEO of LoanWell

This allows Gemini to perform a full pre-qualification or preliminary review for underwriters, quickly identifying deals worth reviewing and significantly speeding up a process that was not possible before.

What’s really great is that where some machine learning models can be a bit of a black box, Gemini actually explains how it arrived at the decision, and the underwriter can then choose to agree or disagree.

Bernard Worthy, co-founder and CEO of LoanWell

Our recently launched loan marketplace also uses Gemini models to directly connect small businesses with our CDFI network. Gemini quickly matches applicants with suitable lenders based on various criteria, streamlining the process for businesses seeking funding. Only 3% of small businesses even know what a CDFI is, so part of the reason we built this is to increase awareness. Our very first marketplace applicant was able to refinance from a crippling 60% interest rate loan to a sustainable 13% interest rate loan, enabling the business to finally grow.

Gemini’s speed and intelligence are key to scaling the impact of what these lenders are already doing. We’re simply enhancing human decision-making by giving people more, better, and faster data, enabling them to insert themselves where they do their best work.

Bernard Worthy, co-founder and CEO of LoanWell

Our vision is to be the rails for capital in the community lending space, connecting different actors with the right capital and technology at the right time. AI, and particularly Gemini, is central to this vision. Its ability to navigate complex lender policies and analyze data will be crucial in creating a seamless and efficient ecosystem.