Zest AI

We strive to make fair and transparent credit available to everyone.

We've been deploying AI tools to make that happen since we began in 2009. As employees, we challenge each other to be great today and even better tomorrow. As a company, we want to make a serious difference, but we aren't always serious.

It started with a flat tire.

Douglas Merrill, former Google CIO, received a call from his sister-in-law, Vic. She had a flat and couldn’t pay for a new tire without taking out a payday loan. And yet she’s a hard-working, creditworthy single mom working several jobs to provide for her kids.

Traditional ways of assessing creditworthiness aren’t working, pushing people like Vic into taking on high interest debt to cope with the smallest of day-to-day issues. Why? Because lenders can’t assess borrowers with limited credit histories, like Vic. With the vision of making fair and transparent credit available to everyone, Douglas founded Zest AI.