About
The story of Ava and the company that builds it.
Ava is AI chat for Canadian financial services work. A chat workspace built for the professionals who underwrite, advise, and analyze for a living. The operator brings intent, judgment, context, and accountability. Ava brings speed, precision, and institutional-grade trust to the work.
The story
2017 – 2019
October 2017. Two months after Google published Attention Is All You Need, Matthew Dobson filed the AI Credit® trademark. A commercial lending veteran with billions in originations across GE Capital, TD Bank, and institutional private credit, he had read the paper and seen the inevitable future of regulated lending work. Registration followed in 2019.
2020 – 2023
As Chief Credit Officer for a bank-backed private credit fund, Matthew operationalized generative AI tools across 145 live U.S. commercial mortgage transactions totalling approximately $150M, including the financing of a multimillion-dollar data center designed to train the foundation models that now power AI. In January 2023, the work produced the first AI-assisted credit writeup ever approved by the U.S. Small Business Administration, a 75-year-old federal agency. AVA was incorporated in Delaware in March 2023.
2024
In May 2024, AVA was redomiciled as AVA Credit Inc. in Toronto, Ontario. Two research papers on human-AI collaboration in financial services were published. JPMorgan selected AVA for its equity management platform. Several RAG-based financial data extraction projects were funded and built, confirming a key lesson: purpose-built AI tools validated against regulatory frameworks outlast custom wrappers chasing model releases.
2025
Matthew was selected for the inaugural Perplexity AI Business Fellowship alongside CEOs from Perplexity, NVIDIA, Databricks, Box, and Bridgewater. He developed the RGI Framework (Retrieve, Generate, Interact) for human-AI collaboration. He also built Canada’s first enterprise AI training program for DLCG Mortgage Group (TSX: DLCG), training 2,271 licensed professionals across 29 live sessions.
2026 Current
AVA Credit Inc. is now organized around one product: Ava, AI chat for Canadian financial services work. Built in Toronto, governed by design.
The name
AVA stands for Accelerated Virtual Analyst. Coined in early 2023 during the development of the AI-powered financial analysis tools that became the foundation of the company’s approach to human-AI collaboration in regulated industries.