Growing up, Suneera Madhani’s father would wake her every morning and tell her “You have it. You can do anything.” Sometimes she found the repetition annoying, but as an adult she understands that “we all have that ‘it’ factor. We need people to pull it out of us.”
Madhani’s parents, through their encouragement, and her brother Sal Rehmetullah, by becoming her business partner, pulled it out and then some. Madhani, 37, has already built and sold Stax, a payment processing service for small businesses that became a unicorn — a startup valued at $1 billion. Now she’s in the midst of a second venture that she believes has even greater potential.
Worth AI promises to deliver the “world’s first unified business credit score” by aggregating financial information that’s available online and feeding it into AI software. Users’ dashboards will also show income and spending activity. The program, Worth Score, should be available for business in January, says Madhani. The company took a big step forward last April when it announced a strategic relationship with consumer credit giant Equifax, giving it access to business credit and principal information.
The program “not just standardizes credit,” she says, but also gives founders the tools to grow their business by making information more accessible. The idea came from hurdles she and Rehmetullah had to overcome launching Stax. “As a woman in business, as a small business owner, just getting access to capital, access to business services — everything from payment processing to lines of credit” was a struggle. “My business in the early days wasn’t ‘mature enough’ to financial institutions to get the financial services needed to actually start the business.”
Worth AI can “change the entire economy because we now have access to understanding the business’ health in a single place,” she says.
Madhani also started CEO School, a mentoring program and podcast with more than 2 million downloads that aims to help other women entrepreneurs find their “it factor.” While women launch nearly as many startups as men, she notes that only 3% of venture capital goes to women-owned businesses.
Rehmetullah, 35, is Worth’s co-founder and co-CEO. “I don’t know anything else in my life besides building a business with my brother because it’s always been the two of us,” Madhani says. They do have a business coach who sometimes serves as a family therapist “to make sure we don’t kill each other some days,” she jokes.
They took a six-month sabbatical after selling Stax and discussed their next big idea, which turned out to be Worth AI. Artificial intelligence is “the next dotcom, the next cloud,” she says, and if used appropriately it can radically hasten business growth. She encourages people to incorporate that into their strategies.
“I’ve always been told, what’s your 10-year plan? Everything is moving so fast that … I don’t think that the 10-year plan applies anymore at the speed at which technology is moving. And so the three-year plan is the new 10-year plan.”