Founded in 2009 as ZestFinance by Douglas Merrill (former CIO of Google), the company rebranded to Zest AI to reflect its focus on providing artificial intelligence solutions to the financial sector. Its mission is to make fair and transparent credit available to everyone. Zest AI's software helps banks, credit unions, and other lenders analyze vast amounts of data to make more accurate and faster credit decisions, aiming to increase loan approvals while reducing risk and unconscious bias in the lending process.