Lama AI, an AI-native loan origination platform purpose-built for community and regional banks, has closed a Series A funding round that brings its total capital raised to over $20m, as the company reports 3x year-on-year revenue growth.
The round was led by EJF Ventures, the FinTech arm of EJF Capital. New investors Fin Capital and 1st & Main joined alongside a number of banking industry veterans, with existing backers Viola Ventures, Hetz Ventures and SixThirty all returning. The proceeds will be used to expand Lama AI’s go-to-market and customer success functions, scaling to meet rising demand from banks across the United States, while the company continues to build out AI capabilities tailored to regulated financial institutions.
The platform is already live at dozens of community and regional banks, including SouthState Bank, Colony Bank, Capital Community Bank, First Bank, Gate City Bank and Luminate Bank, and has processed billions of dollars in loan volume since its launch.
One of the structural problems the platform targets is small business lending, particularly government-guaranteed loans. While these products represent a meaningful opportunity for community and regional banks, the economics are challenging: underwriting a small-dollar loan carries costs comparable to those of a much larger one. This dynamic has historically pushed many institutions to limit their exposure to the segment, even where borrower demand and community need are substantial. Legacy loan origination systems were not built to address this friction. Rigid workflows, static forms and implementation-heavy deployments struggle to handle the volume of borrower variations, document exceptions and policy nuances inherent to SMB and SBA lending.
Lama AI’s platform is designed to handle the full lending lifecycle, from initial borrower intake and document collection through to spreading, underwriting, decisioning, approval, closing and ongoing portfolio monitoring. Crucially, it operates within each institution’s own policies, credit standards and compliance requirements, rather than displacing them. The platform has also expanded beyond its original SMB and SBA focus to support commercial lending products including C&I, CRE, construction and other specialised categories. Its modular design allows banks with existing legacy systems to adopt Lama AI as an entry point for automation in the highest-friction parts of their workflows, rather than requiring a wholesale technology replacement.
Lama AI CEO and co-founder Omri Yacubovich said, “Community and regional banks should not have to choose between speed and discipline. They know their customers, understand local credit, and have the relationships borrowers trust. Lama AI gives them the infrastructure to move faster while preserving the judgment, oversight, and compliance standards that make them strong partners.”
EJF Ventures partner Michael Cherepnin said, “Legacy lending technology platforms were built for a pre-AI world, and newer ones tend to pick a lane. Lama is different – it automates the full range of commercial lending, from SBA to C&I to CRE, and deploys alongside a lender’s existing systems rather than forcing a rip-and-replace. Backed by a proven founding team and growing traction across community and regional banks, we believe Lama could become the defining next-generation platform in a multi-billion-dollar market. We couldn’t be more excited to lead this round and partner with Omri and the team.”
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