Worth Raises $30 Million to Redefine Onboarding and Underwriting for Small Businesses

Worth recently announced $30 million in Series A funding, marking a significant and exciting step forward as the company continues building the necessary infrastructure to modernize decisioning for financial institutions.

As first reported by Inc., the round was led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, with participation from Amex Ventures and TTV Capital. The raise reflects the urgent need across financial services to move beyond fragmented systems that slow down onboarding and underwriting. 

The challenge of fragmented onboarding

The problem Worth is tackling is straightforward, though the systems behind it are not. Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are onboarded and underwritten through processes that rely on disconnected data, manual checks, and inconsistent standards. What should take minutes often takes days. In most cases, it takes longer for a business to be approved than it does for a consumer to acquire a credit card or loan.

Worth’s platform brings those steps into a single, cohesive system, combining business identity, risk signals, credit data, compliance workflows, and fraud detection into a real-time decisioning layer. Instead of forcing financial institutions to reconcile conflicting information across tools, it orchestrates those data flows and resolves gaps as decisions are being made. 

Part of what makes the problem so persistent is how trivial inconsistencies can derail an entire workflow. For example, a business might operate under one name but be registered under another, or an address might not match exactly across systems. These gaps trigger manual reviews, additional documentation requests, and delays that ripple through the process.

As our CEO, Sal, put it, “That creates all this manual friction… it gets flagged, and now they have to provide a lease, and that’s why that process takes three, five, seven days to get somebody underwritten.”

Worth’s technology addresses those mismatches in real time, reducing the friction that has long been treated as unavoidable.

As a result, financial institutions can move faster without sacrificing accuracy, and SMBs can access financial services without getting stuck in arduous approval cycles.

This funding supports continued investment in Worth’s core platform, as well as new initiatives such as Know Your Agent (KYA) frameworks and the development of the Worth Wallet, which is designed to deliver a one-step, global onboarding experience.

Investing in smarter decisioning

As noted by the Orlando Business Journal, the funding will support Worth’s continued development of Decision Intelligence, which enables auditable, automated decisions without slowing the process. The goal is to deliver both speed and complete confidence in every outcome.

After building Stax Payments into a unicorn, Suneera Madhani and Sal Rehmetullah set out with a clearer view of what needed to change. Worth is the result of their second chapter as fintech founders, shaped by experience and a more direct understanding of where financial infrastructure falls short.

“We built Worth to fix a system that wasn’t working. Not just for small businesses, but for the financial institutions trying to serve them,” said Suneera. “When underwriting is fragmented, and onboarding is slow, everyone loses.”

With Stax, Suneera became the first female CEO to lead a Florida-based unicorn, and she returns with Sal and Jacques Fu as a repeat founder, building with a different level of conviction.

The approach in round two is intentional. The lessons from building before are showing up in how they operate now, from how they think about product to how they choose partners. The pace is faster, but the focus is narrower.

At Worth, we’re not layering incremental improvements onto an outdated system; we’re building something better to replace it.

This raise brings more resources to the effort to make financial decisioning work the way it should have all along.

Read the official press release here.