Lukas Haffer is co-founder and chief executive of Casca, the San Francisco company whose AI loan origination platform helps banks take in small business and SBA applications, collect documents, and draft credit analysis.
Core Banking, Then A Lending Startup
Haffer spent four years as chief of staff for the European market at Avaloq, a core banking software company that runs platforms holding trillions of dollars in assets. He saw how much of a bank’s lending work still moved through old systems and manual reviews. After studying at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he and Isaiah Williams, an AI researcher, founded Casca in 2023 to automate that work for small business lending.
They went through Y Combinator. In August 2025 Casca raised $29 million in a Series A led by Canapi Ventures, bringing total funding to $33 million, with Live Oak Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Y Combinator among the backers. Live Oak Bank, a leading SBA lender, and Huntington Bank are flagship customers, and Bankwell Bank invested alongside the venture firms.
Applications That Get Finished
Casca gives borrowers a guided online application and, on the bank side, pulls data from the core and other systems to draft credit and compliance documents for loan officers. Lenders using it have seen application completion rates rise from approximately 5 percent to more than 65 percent. Haffer has described the company as a way to help banks make more small business loans with less manual effort, and to give those businesses a path to bank credit that does not push them toward high-rate online lenders.
