About AVA
AVA was founded by Matthew Dobson and incorporated in Delaware in March 2023, later folded into AVA Credit Inc. and redomiciled in Toronto, Ontario in May 2024. 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 pioneering academic research on neural networks, transformers, and deep learning.
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 filed the AI Credit® trademark and began studying the technology in depth. The trademark was formally secured in late 2019.
From 2020 to 2023, as Chief Credit Officer for a bank-backed private credit fund in Los Angeles, Dobson operationalized generative AI tools and teams across 100 live U.S. SBA 504 commercial mortgage transactions exceeding $100 million. 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. In March 2023, AVA was incorporated in Delaware.
2024 marked rapid growth, experimentation, and institutional recognition. In early 2024, Dobson published two research white papers on human-AI collaboration in financial services. By May, AVA was folded into AVA Credit Inc. and redomiciled in Toronto. That same year, JPMorgan selected AVA for their elite equity management platform. During mid-to-late 2024, AVA funded and built several retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) projects for extracting complex financial data—an initiative that ultimately underscored the relentless pace of AI model development, as newer models quickly surpassed the custom wrappers.
The lessons from 2024’s experiments directly shaped AVA’s 2025 strategy. Dobson was selected for the inaugural Perplexity AI Business Fellowship, an exclusive program featuring CEOs from Perplexity, NVIDIA, Databricks, Box, Replit, and Bridgewater. That same year, he developed the RGI Framework™ (Retrieve, Generate, Interact) and launched a national AI training initiative for Dominion Lending Centres Group (TSX: DLCG), Canada’s largest mortgage network. Through AVA’s consulting division, he built and deployed dlcg.io—featuring live sessions, interactive prompt laboratories, and Isaac, a 24/7 AI agent. The program trained thousands of licensed mortgage professionals with a 97% positive response rate.
All three AVA Credit Inc. divisions are now operating: AVA Credit (mortgage and business financing), AVA Consulting (applied AI enablement), and AVA Media (publishing). [Placeholder for 2026 developments]
AVA stands for “Accelerated Virtual Analyst”—a name coined in early 2023 during the development of AI-powered financial analysis tools that would become the foundation of the company’s approach to human-AI collaboration in enterprise settings.