We’ve Moved • Mid-2025
Contact AVA
150 King Street West
Financial District • Toronto
Headquarters
150 King Street West
Suite #200
Toronto, ON M5H 1J9
Canada
Suite #200
Toronto, ON M5H 1J9
Canada
Connect
md@avacredit.ca
avacredit.ca
avacredit.ca
From midtown beginnings to the heart of Canada’s Financial District.
Est. 2024
About AVA
AVA Credit Inc. was founded by Matthew Dobson and incorporated on May 22, 2024, in Toronto, Ontario. As Canada’s financial capital, Toronto is not only a global hub for banking and commerce but also the birthplace of modern generative AI, shaped by early academic research on neural networks, transformers, and deep learning.
2017–2019
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.
2020–2023
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
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.
2025
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.
The Name
AVA stands for “Accelerated Virtual Analyst”—a name coined during the early development of AI-powered financial analysis tools that would eventually become the foundation of the company’s approach to human-AI collaboration in enterprise settings.
Matthew Dobson
Founder & CEO, AVA Credit Inc.
Financial Services Veteran
20+ years at GE Capital, TD Bank, and private credit. Billions in commercial lending originations across Canada and the United States.
AI Credit® Pioneer
Trademarked AI Credit® in 2019. Led 145+ live AI-enabled mortgage transactions as Chief Credit Officer, proving human-AI collaboration.
2025 Perplexity AI Fellow
Elite program with CEOs of Perplexity, NVIDIA, Databricks, Box, and leading AI pioneers.
Elite
The Journey
Matthew Dobson is a seasoned financial services leader in Toronto with more than two decades of expertise in commercial lending. He is the founder of AVA Credit Inc., a pioneering platform that integrates generative AI into mortgage and business finance workflows. He has held senior sales and credit leadership roles at GE Capital and TD Bank, and he served as Chief Credit Officer for a bank-backed private credit fund in Los Angeles, specializing in complex commercial financing.
In 2019, Matthew trademarked AI Credit® in Canada and pioneered the use of generative AI models in live credit underwriting. From 2020 to 2023, he led AI-enabled credit trials on 145 U.S. Small Business Administration bank-grade mortgage transactions, demonstrating how human expertise and large language models can collaborate to improve lending decisions. A landmark transaction in 2021 involved a multimillion-dollar loan to a data center supporting early AI training infrastructure for a leading foundation model.
In 2025, Matthew is leading AI enablement at Dominion Lending Centres Group (DLCG), Canada’s largest mortgage network, training corporate staff and mortgage professionals on generative AI integration. Selected as a 2025 Perplexity AI Business Fellow, Matthew combines deep financial acumen with hands-on operational expertise with AI to drive innovation in lending and enterprise workflows. Born and raised in Toronto, he is a graduate of Western University.