The Sharpei Lending Edge: Maria Azofra with Anna Barber

In episode 120 of Venture Everywhere, Anna Barber, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Maria Azofra, co-founder and CEO of Sharpei — an AI-native operating system for embedded equipment financing that helps lenders automate and accelerate the loan origination process. Maria shares how building Yakk, a B2B equipment rental marketplace in Spain, exposed a frustrating industry-wide bottleneck: lenders taking 20 to 30 days to approve transactions, losing deals before they could ever close. Sharpei’s vision is to become the origination infrastructure for every lender in the US — modernizing a $1.3 trillion industry that still runs on emails, PDFs, and phone calls.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Iterating through multiple business models to find true market pull.
• Targeting pre-qualification as lending’s most overlooked bottleneck.
• Automating credit file creation from days to hours with AI.
• Using lenders as the distribution channel to reach merchants at scale.
• Building leasing infrastructure that captures residual asset value.

Learn more about Maria Azofra | Sharpei

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariaazofra/en

Website: https://www.gosharpei.com/

Learn more about Anna Barber | Everywhere VC

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annawbarber

Website: https://everywhere.vc/