Connecting global lenders to underserved SMEs through tokenization

Problem

Global capital fails to reach the businesses best positioned to grow with it. Collateral-based lending excludes roughly 70% of small and medium enterprises, and manual credit scoring is slow, expensive, and prone to bias – assessments take a week or more, and marginalized businesses are routinely overlooked. Cross-border lending compounds the problem: foreign lenders struggle to price SME risk in unfamiliar jurisdictions, and supply-chain friction traps working capital just when businesses need it most. The result is a $5.7 trillion global credit gap affecting more than 131 million firms – one that traditional banks, by their own structural constraints, cannot close.

Solution

Kea closes the gap by bringing SMEs on-chain and matching them with global lenders through programmable infrastructure. KeaFi, Kea’s proprietary AI underwriting agent, ingests financial, banking, and compliance data against more than 200 risk metrics to deliver an on-chain credit score in under fifteen seconds – a process that traditionally takes one to two weeks. Future cash-flow assets like invoices, inventory, and trade instruments are then tokenized into vaults with 7-to-120-day maturities. Lenders from any geography – institutions, family offices, or retail wallets holding as little as $100 in stablecoins – can subscribe to vaults matching their risk profile, with smart contracts handling disbursement and USDC repayment.

We looked at a lot of chains when deciding what to build Kea on – chains chasing noise where headlines are generated on apps that do not stand the test of time. Hedera is different. The Hedera Council is the room that dictates what happens next in technology, finance, healthcare, education. Hedera stays consistent with that mission: enterprise-grade infrastructure built to bring real-world assets on-chain. That is exactly what Kea is doing, and it is why we are building here.

Jo D’Silva

CEO & Co-Founder

Modernising private credit through AI scoring and tokenized vaults

Kea combines two engines into a single flywheel. KeaFi handles the credit assessment layer – pulling financial documents, performing ratio analysis across roughly twelve financial dimensions, layering in behavioural analytics, client concentration and growth signals, and external geopolitical data, then mapping the result to a forward-looking credit grade. The output is a rapidly generated – yet reliably calculated – structured risk profile that lenders can transparently inspect before committing capital. Because Kea also performs Know-Your-Client’s-Client checks on the borrower side, lenders gain confidence that the underlying invoices and assets are genuine and verifiable.

On the lending side, vaults are programmable and bespoke. Kea today offers a range of pools – from SME secured credit pools and risk-shared lending vaults to capital-protected stablecoin vaults, forex settlement vaults, and structured products. Pool addresses, asset types, redemption windows, and risk classifications are all visible on-chain. The protocol is fully non-custodial: lenders and borrowers hold their own wallets, and matching happens via peer-to-peer pool subscription. Settlement uses native USDC on Hedera through Hedera Token Service, and Kea uses HTS and Hedera Smart Contract Service for tokenization, disbursement logic, and automated repayment flows.

KYC and KYB are extensive on the borrower side, mirroring or exceeding what a traditional lender would perform. Lender-side checks focus on wallet screening, sanctions enforcement, and jurisdictional compliance. Institutional lenders complete full institutional KYC; retail wallet participants are screened algorithmically. The result is a system that retains the trust signals institutional capital demands while opening access to anyone with a stablecoin wallet and an interest in real yield.

The road ahead

A cross-chain bridge, currently in audit, will let any Hedera protocol swap stablecoins from other ecosystems into native USDC without wrapped-token overhead. A Visa-powered spendable layer will let users hold yield-bearing positions and access them via debit card, with a phase-two feature allowing them to borrow against positions in Bonzo, SaucerSwap, and other Hedera-based protocols, keeping TVL inside the ecosystem.

Why Hedera?

Kea’s decision to build on Hedera came down to alignment, not noise. Fast finality and predictable low fees are essential for a credit product where margins are thin and settlement timing matters, but what made Hedera distinctive was its governance and its consistency. Hedera Council provides the kind of credibility institutional borrowers and lenders demand. For a protocol bringing regulated SMEs and institutional capital on-chain, that institutional grounding matters more than marketing momentum.

Kea’s business model is B2B2C: it brings enterprise borrowers on-chain and connects them to both institutional and retail liquidity. That mapping mirrors Hedera’s own positioning. Where other ecosystems chase short-lived consumer apps, Hedera has stayed focused on enterprise infrastructure. Kea is increasingly positioning itself as a critical bridge from that enterprise layer to retail participation.