In sixth grade, Kanan Ajmera watched a BBC documentary on Santiago Calatrava and was captivated by buildings that moved like skeletons. Around the same time, she was helping her father—a technologist with a side obsession for temple architecture—trace intricate blueprints into AutoCAD, long before digital renderings were commonplace. That intersection of design, code, and curiosity never left her.
She studied architecture in India, earned her master’s in Illinois, and began her career at an architect’s studio in Chicago. But it was New York that rerouted her path away from designing buildings and toward shaping how they’re funded. She worked on affordable housing developments in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, then crossed over to the capital side: first underwriting equity at PNC, then structuring debt deals at Citibank. By the time she’d seen all sides of the table—architect, developer, underwriter—Ajmera wasn’t interested in optimizing the system. She wanted to rebuild it.
That led her to found Builders Patch, a platform designed to streamline and accelerate the financing process for multifamily and affordable housing. In an industry where underwriting a single deal can take over four months and involve endless phone calls, PDFs, and duplicated data entry, Builders Patch offers a digital infrastructure built for speed, accuracy, and transparency. It’s a rare two-sided solution, built for both lenders and developers, with an AI engine that helps underwrite and close loans in a fraction of the time.
Her background in architecture still shows up in how she diagrams problems, how she iterates, and how she treats design as a method of simplification. But the work now is less about physical space than operational capacity. Builders Patch isn’t trying to reinvent housing. It’s trying to make sure the deals behind it can actually get done.
Ajmera knows the stakes: a shortfall of 7 million affordable units, with 20 million more needed this decade. But her focus is pragmatic, not performative. What she’s building is infrastructure, informed by firsthand knowledge and shaped by people who’ve lived the constraints, not just studied them.
