Facing a credit wall, here's how AI may be the key to keeping the auto market afloat

The leap from founder-led hustle to a structured, scalable go-to-market engine is where many startup dreams meet harsh reality. With marketing and sales budgets perpetually under the microscope, calls for "efficiency" through technology have never been louder—nor the demand for tangible results more acute.

For companies like Karus, this means the old playbooks are being radically re-evaluated, with AI at the heart of a quest for genuine outcomes, not just operational activity. Aaron Travis, Co-Founder and CEO of the AI-driven lending optimization firm puts it in context: "For us, success with AI and our new marketing stack isn't about open rates or how many meetings we book. It's about one thing: closed accounts. We'd rather have three closed deals from five highly targeted meetings than two deals from thirty. That’s the kind of radical efficiency and tangible results AI should deliver."

Journey towards a smarter stack: After securing its first dozen customers through founder-led marketing, Karus now focuses on building a more structured sales organization. "Certainly AI is at the top of everyone's mind as to how to reach your right cohorts, find your right cohorts, develop content," Travis notes. "I'm hoping to have what looks less like a traditional army of account executives and SDRs and maybe AI agents are supplementing what would be a much smaller sales team."

Auto market in distress: Karus operates in the automotive lending space. Its optimization tools use predictive technologies, including AI, to help financial institutions (banks, credit unions, and OEM captives) improve auto loan decisions, pricing accuracy, and automation. The auto lending niche has seen considerable turmoil. "The last four or five years have been one of the most difficult for auto lending in our economy's history," Travis observes, adding that "there's been more defaults and charge-offs than even in the great financial crisis." In such an environment, precision becomes paramount. "The need to be more accurate is as high as it's ever been," he believes, seeing AI-driven solutions as the key

Beyond traditional credit scoring: Referring to traditional credit metrics like FICO, Travis explains, "Those scores have historically been very inaccurate and currently even less accurate with all the volatility around government payments." Karus steps in to provide a more precise way to assess borrowers and price loans for the automotive niche, rather than competing directly with legacy credit score providers.

Private credit: Looking ahead, Travis identifies clear growth opportunities by sticking to Karus' core strength: superior pricing for auto loans. "Banks have been pulling away and pulling back from traditional lending," he says. "We've seen in fintech neo-banks coming in and filling some of those holes." Beyond traditional institutions, he points to another avenue: "Additionally, there's a part of the capital markets that is growing expansion exponentially and it's called private credit or alternative credit. And those asset managers like to own consumer credit." Travis is confident in his company's positioning here. "So we believe that that's going to drive a lot of revenue for Karus in that part of the capital markets, believing that our pricing is the best." Ultimately, whether for a bank or a private credit fund, Karus aims for a simple outcome: "it leads to higher returns."

A looming credit wall: You can see generally from top to bottom that we're hitting sort of a credit wall, whether that's the 36 trillion at the sovereign government level or all the student loans and medical bills," Travis says. "Whether it's an individual, a corporation or a country, everyone has sort of maxed out their credit cards right now. And so there could be some pain coming out of that." Despite these concerns, Travis maintains an optimistic outlook, hoping for efficiencies from AI to benefit all industries quickly.