Backstop

What if everyday investors could access structured private-credit opportunities, traditionally reserved for institutions? What if small businesses gained a new way to raise capital?

Backstop is an AI-powered lending marketplace that answers these questions. It connects small-business borrowers with investors through automated underwriting, capital formation, and blockchain-based payments.

Currently, private credit is a rapidly growing financial market, but participating in it remains difficult for smaller investors and businesses.

Traditional underwriting is expensive, smaller loans are difficult to structure efficiently, and investors often have limited flexibility in choosing the risks they want to take.

A small business seeking $10,000 and an investor seeking diversified credit exposure face very different problems. Backstop brings them into the same marketplace.

Backstop combines three core innovations to solve this issue:

1. Agentic Underwriting

Small businesses submit loan applications and financial information. An AWS-powered underwriting agent evaluates cash flow, identifies missing documentation, and determines when additional financial verification would improve its assessment.

Rather than relying solely on borrower-reported information, the agent can autonomously purchase a synthetic cash-flow report through Mastercard AP4M using RLUSD.

2. Investor-Directed Capital Structuring

Investors can explore individual loans and diversified portfolios, selecting their preferred risk exposure:

• Senior: Highest repayment priority, with lower modeled risk and returns.
• Mezzanine: Intermediate repayment priority and risk.
• Junior: First-loss capital with higher potential returns.

Investors submit funding bids, and Backstop's deterministic clearing engine evaluates whether those bids can form a feasible capital structure.

Instead of offering everyone the same investment, Backstop enables investors to choose how they participate in a loan's risk and return.

3. Blockchain-Enabled Financial Infrastructure

Backstop integrates the XRPL EVM ecosystem to demonstrate transparent, verifiable financial activity.

Mastercard AP4M enables autonomous RLUSD payments for financial information. QuickNode provides the blockchain infrastructure for verifying testnet transactions and merchant settlement.

Our prototype follows a fictional bakery seeking $10,000 in financing.

The borrower submits an application, the underwriting agent reviews its finances, and an autonomous payment purchases additional synthetic cash-flow information. The agent incorporates that report into its assessment.

The borrower then enters a demonstration lending marketplace where investors can evaluate loan opportunities, submit bids, and explore senior, mezzanine, and junior capital structures.

We have verified a real 0.01 test-RLUSD report purchase and merchant payout through QuickNode, alongside AWS-based analysis that incorporates the purchased report.

Investment commitments and tranche financing currently run through a clearly labeled simulation, rather than representing real funded loans.

Backstop demonstrates how autonomous AI agents, programmable payments, and structured-credit marketplaces can work together to lower the operational barriers to smaller-scale credit financing.

Our vision is simple: give businesses more ways to access capital, and give investors more control over the risks they choose to take.