Worth AI Founders' Story: From Stax Unicorn to $30M Series A
Most founders who exit a billion-dollar company take the win and step back.
Suneera Madhani and her brother Sal Rehmetullah didn't.
About a year after leaving Stax Payments — the company they built from a $50,000 friends-and-family loan into a fintech unicorn — the Orlando-based siblings quietly started building something new.
They spent roughly a year in stealth mode on an AI-powered credit underwriting and risk management platform for small businesses before going public with it.
That company, Worth, has now raised a $30 million Series A round.
The story behind it says as much about what repeat founders do differently as it does about the underwriting problem they're chasing.
Founded in 2023 and based in Orlando, Florida, Worth builds AI-powered onboarding and underwriting infrastructure for financial institutions.
It has now raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, with Amex Ventures and TTV Capital also participating — on top of an earlier round from March 2025 that different outlets have reported as either $20 million or $25 million.
Where This Story Starts
Madhani and Rehmetullah aren't newcomers to fintech, or to each other.
The siblings are children of Pakistani immigrants who settled in Chicago, and they've said their parents' experience running small businesses shaped how they think about entrepreneurship.
Madhani has said she witnessed the underwriting pain point firsthand as a kid, watching her parents struggle to get credit as small-business owners — and again during her nine years running Stax.
The specific frustration: financial institutions underwriting small businesses often fall back on the personal credit scores of the owners, because no standardized business credit score exists.
Their first company, Stax, nearly didn't survive its early years.
Founded in 2014 as a flat-fee alternative to percentage-based payment processing, it got a $17.5 million buyout offer from a competitor in 2017.
Investors pushed Madhani to take it. She and Rehmetullah said no, and took out a loan to keep the lights on instead. Stax went on to raise more than $263 million and crossed a $1 billion valuation in 2022.
By the time the siblings exited, the company had grown to over $140 million in recurring revenue with $245 million raised total.
What Worth Actually Does
The pitch is simple to say and hard to build: consumer credit has gotten instant, but small-business credit hasn't.
Madhani has put it directly — a consumer can apply for a credit card on their phone and use it minutes later, but a small business applying for similar financing is stuck in a slower, paperwork-heavy process that can take days or weeks.
Worth's platform is built to prefill and underwrite small-business applications using just three fields — business name, address, and tax ID — automating checks a financial institution would otherwise do by hand. It bundles credit assessments, Know Your Business and Know Your Customer checks, banking data, and fraud detection into one decisioning system.
Here's the honest caveat: automated underwriting in financial services is crowded and heavily regulated, and "we consolidate KYB/KYC and credit decisioning" is a claim several well-funded competitors are also making right now.
Worth's stated differentiator is data breadth — the company says it's built on a database covering more than 700 million businesses across 200+ countries. Whether that actually holds up against rivals chasing the same problem will show up in retention numbers over the next few years, not in a funding announcement.
The Money, In Order
- 2023 pre-seed: An eight-figure round that included some of Stax's original investors, including Orlando-based DeepWork Capital and the Florida Opportunity Fund
- March 2025: A round TechCrunch reported as a $20 million seed raise; FinTech Futures later described the same period's round as $25 million. Neither source resolves the gap, so take the exact figure with a grain of salt
- March 2026: A $30 million Series A led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, with Amex Ventures and TTV Capital participating
On traction, the founders told TechCrunch in March 2025 that annual recurring revenue was in the "seven figures," with growth "exceeding triple digits" and 12 new customers added in a single quarter.
At that point Worth counted more than 25 clients, including Aurora Payments, REPAY Holdings, Fairwinds, and PatientFi. More recent numbers haven't been publicly disclosed.
Rehmetullah said the new capital goes toward refining the existing product, building out a "Know Your Agent" framework, and expanding the company's Decision Intelligence line.
Amex Ventures' Margaret Lim said the firm backed Worth because of its automation and growth momentum, though no valuation for this round has been made public.
Here's how one startup is turning fixed deposits into instant credit cards
What's Next
Worth has said it plans to launch a "Worth Score" — a standardized business credit score — directly to small businesses, so SMBs can understand their own financial standing instead of relying entirely on institutional underwriting.
Longer term, the company is positioning something it calls the "Worth Wallet," a one-click global onboarding experience for small businesses.
The real question is whether Worth can hold its differentiation as more AI-native underwriting competitors show up, and whether faster onboarding actually converts into the retention and margins that justify this size of raise.
That's not something a press release answers — it's something the next 18 months of client renewals will.
Read how two founders sold their startup for $50M, then got the old team back together for round two
