Karus

About Karus

Karus is an artificial intelligence platform specializing in auto finance decisioning and portfolio analytics for lenders, dealers, and financial institutions. Founded in 2020 by Aaron Travis (CEO), James Harrison (COO), and Paul Kostoff, the company is headquartered in San Francisco. The founders started Karus to address process inefficiencies and the lack of data-driven decision-making in the consumer auto finance industry.

The company's core offering is an AI decisioning engine trained on over 20 million historical auto loan outcomes, analyzing more than 1,000 variables in real-time to assess credit risk. This enables lenders to make more informed decisions, particularly for subprime borrowers. Karus provides a suite of products including 'Realtime-underwriting' for automating point-of-origination decisions, 'Flow' which gives institutional investors access to auto originations, 'KGPT' an LLM for data analysis, and forecasting tools for private portfolios and Intex users. These tools help clients optimize approval rates, manage portfolios, and forecast cash flows.

Karus serves a range of clients in the auto finance ecosystem, including banks, credit unions, auto dealers, and private credit firms. The business model is centered on providing its AI-powered platform and tools to these institutions to improve their lending operations. As of December 2025, the platform had processed over $5 billion in auto loan volume. The company has received backing from investors such as OAK'S LAB, Capital Eleven, StageDotO, and Tacora Capital. In a significant milestone, ETHZilla Corporation acquired a 20% interest in Karus in December 2025 to integrate its AI underwriting into blockchain infrastructure for tokenizing auto-loan assets.