In October 2017, a University of Toronto AI PhD student shared Google’s Attention Is All You Need paper with Matthew Dobson, a commercial lending veteran with billions in originations and leadership roles at GE Capital, TD Bank, and institutional private credit. While many saw a groundbreaking academic paper, Dobson saw the inevitable future of financial services. Within two months, he had filed the AI Credit® trademark and began studying the technology in depth.

The AI Credit® trademark was formally secured in late 2019. From 2020 to 2023, as Chief Credit Officer, Dobson operationalized generative AI tools and teams across 145 live U.S. SBA 504 commercial mortgage transactions totaling $150 million USD. This period established proof that human-AI collaboration could succeed in high-stakes lending. A defining highlight came in 2021 with the funding of a multimillion-dollar data center designed to train the foundation models powering today’s AI revolution.

2024 marked a period of rapid growth, experimentation, and institutional recognition for AVA. In early 2024, Dobson published two research white papers on human-AI collaboration in financial services, and by May, AVA Credit Inc. was formally incorporated in Canada, replacing the original Delaware entity. That same year, JPMorgan recognized AVA’s potential, selecting it for their elite equity management platform. During mid-to-late 2024, AVA funded and built several retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) projects aimed at extracting complex financial data from corporate statements—an initiative that ultimately underscored the relentless pace of AI model development, as newer models quickly surpassed the custom wrappers and rendered those projects obsolete.

The lessons from 2024’s experiments directly shaped AVA’s 2025 strategy. In early 2025, Dobson and AVA were invited into the Perplexity AI Business Fellowship, an exclusive program featuring the CEOs of Perplexity, NVIDIA, Databricks, Box, Replit, Bridgewater, Bloomberg Beta, and other leading venture firms. Over 18 sessions, Fellows gained unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to how enterprise AI is truly being built and scaled. By mid-2025, AVA launched its Applied AI division, expanding beyond research and financial services into broader enterprise adoption strategies.