Loot

Traditional banks decline roughly half of the small businesses that apply for financing, relying on lagging indicators like FICO scores and tax returns instead of what's actually happening in a business's bank account right now. Loot's founders — John Cain, who personally underwrote, funded, and serviced more than $3 billion in SMB funding before Loot, and Luke Peake, TIB's own co-founder — set out to build Loot around a simple idea: underwrite on real cash flow, decide in seconds instead of weeks, and never make a small business owner feel like they're begging a bank for their own money.

That's a big claim in a crowded lending category that includes players like Kabbage, Bluevine, and OnDeck. Backing it up meant every touchpoint — brand, marketing site, application, portal, mobile apps, and the AI making the actual funding decisions — had to feel faster, clearer, and more trustworthy than anything else in the space.

Lending brands tend to default to one of two moods: corporate-blue trustworthy, or fintech-generic slick. Loot needed a third option — warm, direct, and just playful enough to feel human, without ever undercutting the seriousness of moving real money. We built the full identity system: wordmark, colour palette, typography, and a voice with a subtle pirate undertone — "captain," "crew," "haul," "treasure" — that shows up in the product without ever feeling like a gimmick. The name sets the tone on its own: Loot isn't a fee. It's the capital a business earned and got locked out of for too long.

• Logo & wordmark
• Colour & type system
• Brand voice & copy guidelines
• Illustration style
• Marketing templates

getloot.com has one job: turn a skeptical small business owner into an applicant, fast. We designed and built the full marketing site around that single path — clear eligibility signals up front, real numbers instead of vague promises, and trust markers (a 4.8-star Trustpilot rating, an A+ BBB rating) placed where a first-time visitor actually looks for them, not buried in a footer. It reads less like a lender's homepage and more like a product page: here's what it does, here's what it costs, here's how fast you get it.

• Conversion-first UX
• SEO
• Trust & compliance messaging
• Responsive build

The flow is deliberately short: apply online in minutes, connect a business bank account via Plaid, and let Blackbeard AI take it from there. Most applicants hear back within 24 hours — many in under a minute. Approved businesses get a funding limit with zero obligation to draw immediately, and a 14-day window to make their first draw and activate their Loot account. We designed every screen in that path to answer the two questions an applicant actually has in the moment — "did it work" and "what happens next" — with a live progress state instead of a black-box submission form.

Everything a Loot customer needs lives in one dashboard at app.getloot.com — greeted as "Captain," not "User." The home screen surfaces available funding and the next payment date at a glance, an AI-generated "Treasure Hunt" report that finds recurring costs the business could cut, and a live financial health panel — cash on hand, monthly burn, runway — written in plain English by Blackbeard, not just charted.

We built genuinely native apps for both platforms — not a WebView shortcut — so a Loot customer can check their balance, request a draw, or catch a payment reminder with the same speed and polish as any modern banking app. Push notifications handle the moments that matter most: funds have landed, a payment's coming up tomorrow, a funding limit just increased. Biometric login keeps access fast without cutting corners on security.

• Native iOS
• Native Android
• Push notifications
• Biometric auth

Behind the customer-facing product sits LootOS, the account management system TIB built to run origination, collections, risk monitoring, and reporting in a single platform. There's no third-party servicer in the loop — every draw, every repayment, every renegotiated schedule is handled natively inside LootOS, giving Loot's own team real-time visibility into the entire portfolio instead of waiting on a vendor's reporting cycle. We designed the internal tools Loot's underwriting, collections, and customer success teams use every day — including a portfolio-wide statistics dashboard tracking draws, repayments, payment-flexibility requests, and Blackbeard Chat engagement, filterable by date range.

• Origination pipeline
• Collections & risk monitoring
• Portfolio reporting
• Internal admin console

At the centre of LootOS is Blackbeard AI, the underwriting engine built to replace weeks of manual review with a decision that happens while the applicant is still on the page. It ingests bank statements and financial documents directly, tags every transaction to build a real-time cash flow profile, and scores the business across a comprehensive set of cash flow metrics — no personal score required. Every recommendation comes with a confidence score and a rationale, not just a yes or no, so a human underwriter can focus on the exceptions instead of reviewing every file. It doesn't stop at approval — Blackbeard AI keeps watching active accounts for early risk signals, flagging portfolio-wide changes before they become losses. The model runs on more than 2 million data points today, and it's built to keep improving: every draw Loot originates makes the next decision a little sharper.

• Document & bank data ingestion
• Cash-flow scoring
• Confidence-scored decisions
• Portfolio risk monitoring