Audaz Capital

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We (Re)Invested on Linker Finance! Linker Finance just closed a $5M in Seed funding with backing from Chingona Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, Audaz Capital, and Angeles Ventures alongside a new strategic investor: 22nd State Banking Company, one of Linker's own customers. We first backed Jorge Garcia, Claudia Bardales, and Alejandro Corpeño in 2023, right after Techstars, and since then, contracted ARR is up 600% year over year, the live customer base has grown 5x, and Vault.bank (built on Linker) helped Bank of Brodhead grow deposits 20% in its first full year. Community banks carry an outsized share of the country's most important lending, yet most are still running digital experiences a decade behind. Linker is closing that gap! We're proud to keep showing up for Jorge, Claudia, Alejandro, and the entire Linker Finance team, and for community banks, who deserve technology that matches the trust their customers already give them. Read more in the following link - https://lnkd.in/d8EepqZj Adela Cepeda David Olivencia Francisco Mariscal #AngelesVentures #Fintech #CommunityBanks #SeedFunding #VentureCapital #AgenticAI #BankingInnovation #LatinoFounders

🥁 Today is a special day for all of us at #LinkerFinance 🥁 We're incredibly excited to announce our $5 million funding round, an important milestone that allows us to accelerate what we've been building from day one: helping community banks compete and grow with modern digital infrastructure without losing what makes community banking special: trusted relationships. Read announcement here: https://prn.to/4ykcI0Z This milestone belongs to so many people: ❤️ To our customers who partnered with us from day one and have grown with us ever since. ❤️ To our new investor 22nd State Banking Company and existing ones Chingona Ventures TenOneTen Ventures Audaz Capital and Angeles Investors who believed in our vision and keep doubling down on it. ❤️ To our partners who have helped us expand what's possible. ❤️ And most importantly, to our team, whose passion, resilience, and commitment have made this possible. This funding isn't the finish line. It's fuel. We'll continue investing in the products, partnerships, and AI-powered capabilities that help community banks deliver better experiences, deepen customer relationships, and compete while staying true to what makes them different. - Jorge Garcia Alejandro Corpeño Pete Torres Willis Overton Claudia Bardales Matt Deines #SmallBizBanking #DepositGrowth #CommunityBanks #BusinessBanking

📢 Audaz Capital is proud to announce our investment in Please Assist Me (PAM), the tech-enabled home services platform embedded inside multifamily communities across DC, Chicago, and (soon) Miami. Led by CEO Stephanie Cummings, MBA, PAM pairs a trained on-site workforce with a software platform to deliver home cleaning, package management, and resident services directly inside apartment buildings, already trusted with recurring access to 50,000+ occupied units. We're joining Collab Capital, Black Tech Nation Ventures, Backstage Capital, Techstars, and other investors backing PAM's Series Seed round. This is exactly the kind of capital-efficient, execution first company Audaz looks for: a founder who has quietly built real infrastructure, real revenue, and real trust in an industry that runs on reputation. Congrats to Stephanie and the entire PAM team; excited to be part of the next chapter. #VentureCapital #Proptech #EarlyStageInvesting #Audaz

Picking the wrong AI underwriting partner costs CDFIs months, contract fees, and lost borrowers. Here are our Do's and Don'ts for getting it right the first time: 🟢 DO hand the vendor your credit policy before the first demo. Many small CDFIs lack the technology to underwrite loans, manage operations, and conduct outreach efficiently. The onboarding hours are where that pain compounds. 🔴 DON'T trust the polished demo file. They built it to make their AI look good. Your portfolio doesn't look like that. 🟢 DO run the AI against deals you already declined. The disagreements teach you more than the matches. 🔴 DON'T pilot on net-new applications first. Calibrate the model against deals you already underwrote, where you can compare its disagreements to the calls you already made. 🟢 DO keep your loan officers in the override loop from day one. Logging every override is the compliance architecture itself. 🔴 DON'T stop reviewing the file when the AI says it's confident. That's when the loan officer's instincts matter most. 🟢 DO ask the vendor whose credit policy the AI is following. 🔴 DON'T accept "ours" as the answer. They don't have your credit box, and the AI knows it. What's the part of your credit policy that no off-the-shelf model would catch on its own?

Human underwriters read bank statements top-down... AI reads them all at once. Here's a real-world demo we ran on a retail sunshade business applying for a microloan. They came in with 3 months of bank statements + the documents every CDFI asks for on intake. What the AI surfaced in the first pass: 🟢 Seasonality in deposits, expected for the business type 🟢 Lumpy revenue, but consistent year-over-year 🟢 Transfer activity suggesting the account functions as a pass-through 🟢 Cash flow inflated by inter-account movement, masking real revenue Time to flag the pass-through → 30 seconds. A human underwriter would catch the same pattern on page 4 of the statement, halfway through a 45-minute read. But sometimes, they never see it. Then we stress-tested: 🟢 Deposits down 15% (still passed) 🟢 Higher debt load layered on top (still passed) The AI handles the analyst's grunt work, where talented folks key numbers off tax returns into spreadsheets for hours. The credit decision belongs to the underwriter. For most community banks under $10B, that's still how small business deals get done. What's eating the most hours on your underwriting team each week? If it's the prep work before the decision, AI can take most of that load.

The financial industry continues to underestimate the Hispanic market — and its own growth potential. Nearly 70 million Hispanic Americans contribute more than $4 trillion to U.S. GDP. Yet this community remains one of the most underserved by financial institutions in the country. And even when institutions recognize the opportunity, most still miss what matters most: trust. Earning the trust of the Hispanic community is not a marketing tactic. It cannot be achieved by adding "the Latino audience" to a campaign brief. Trust, like interest, compounds over time — and it is built through listening, speaking plainly, respecting real fears and real aspirations, and creating experiences that feel genuinely relevant. That kind of trust cannot be manufactured. It has to be earned. At Finhabits, improving the financial lives of Latinos in the U.S. is not a positioning statement — it is the mission. And when nearly 1 million registered users, 120K YouTube subscribers, and hundreds of thousands of newsletter readers engage with your platform every month, you feel the weight of that. Not just as validation. As responsibility. #Fintech #FinancialLiteracy #LatinoWealth (This photo was taken last week. People stopped Carlos Garcia on the street because they recognized him. Two of them are clients. That's what trust looks like.)

We were proud to have Carlos Murguia, Partner at Audaz Capital, participate in AUTM’s panel discussion, “Closing the Deal: What Industry Wants—and Why Startups Choose Texas.” The conversation explored what industry leaders, investors, and startups are looking for when building partnerships, commercializing innovation, and scaling companies in competitive markets. A special thank you to Myrriah Tomar, Ph.D., for moderating such an engaging session. We’re also fortunate to have Myrriah as an advisor to Audaz, where she continues to provide valuable guidance around innovation, commercialization, and ecosystem development. At Audaz, we remain committed to supporting founders across the U.S. Southwest and helping strengthen the innovation ecosystems emerging across Texas, New Mexico, and the broader Borderplex region. #AUTM #AudazCapital #VentureCapital #Startups #Innovation #TechnologyTransfer #Entrepreneurship #Texas #Borderplex #Commercialization

Today marks the final session of the 2026 FIRE Venture Fellows program, and we couldn’t be prouder of this cohort and everything they accomplished throughout the semester. FIRE Venture Fellows, hosted by the Hunt Center for Entrepreneurship at Arrowhead Center at NMSU, brings together students from NMSU and UTEP for hands-on exposure to venture capital, startup evaluation, due diligence, and early-stage investing. A huge congratulations to our fellows for their commitment, curiosity, and engagement throughout the program. This year’s cohort brought together students from a wide range of disciplines, and it was exciting to watch their growth and confidence develop with each session. 2026 FIRE Venture Fellows Cohort: Diego Hernandez, Victoria G M., Dustin Garcia Reyes, Grace Olagunju, Rasana Maharjan, Hamza Badrari, @Carlos Hernandez, and Samriddhi Ghimire. As the next step in their journey, the fellows will now transition into internships with venture capital funds and startup ecosystem organizations across the region, supported by the Hunt Center for Entrepreneurship. Special thanks to Daniel Jones for serving as Fellowship Host and for sharing invaluable founder, operator, and investment perspectives with the cohort throughout the semester. We also want to recognize Alejandro NAJERA-ACOSTA, Carlos Cuesta, and Carlos Murguia from the Hunt Center team for helping coordinate and support the program behind the scenes. A very special thank you as well to all of the mentors, guest speakers, investors, and ecosystem leaders who joined us throughout the program and helped inspire the next generation of founders and investors across the Borderplex region: Carlos Murguia, Adrien Simard, Bill Smallwood, Amanda Giannini, Beto Pallares, Ben Hokenson, Candice Lee Owens, and Drew Tulchin. Programs like FIRE Venture Fellows continue to reinforce the importance of creating stronger pathways into innovation and venture capital for students in our region, and we are excited to see what this cohort accomplishes next. #VentureCapital #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #Startups #NMSU #UTEP #Borderplex #FIREFellows #ArrowheadCenter #HuntCenterForEntrepreneurship