Our Mission
Dandridge Funding was founded to help small- to medium-sized businesses access the capital they need to grow and succeed. To secure that financing, we become deeply knowledgeable about each client's business — structuring and packaging the loan request, presenting it to a lending institution that's a good fit for the transaction, and seeing it through to closing and funding.
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But capital is only half of what it takes to build a lasting business. The same deep understanding we develop to fund a company, we apply through data science and practical agentic AI — helping owners uncover hidden revenue, protect their margins, and turn borrowed capital into durable growth. That is our mission: to help clients succeed over the long term by pairing the right financing with the insight to use it well. Applied together, these two disciplines can be genuinely transformative — changing the trajectory of a business's development, growth, and expansion.
Who We Are
Bernie Dandridge — Founder & Principal
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Bernie Dandridge founded Dandridge Funding to put decades of lending experience on the borrower's side of the table. Over a 30-year finance career — more than a decade in SBA and commercial lending — he has served as an SBA Business Development Officer and commercial lender, closing SBA 7(a), 504, USDA, and conventional deals, and earlier led wholesale mortgage production across twelve states at Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, closing over $300MM monthly. He specializes in business-acquisition financing, owner-occupied commercial real estate, and the disciplined credit structuring a committee expects — cash-flow and DSCR analysis, capital-stack design, and lender-ready packaging. His conviction is simple: an owner deserves an advisor who understands both sides of the deal and stays for the long term — which is why he pairs capital with data analytics and agentic AI, and brought in Fred Duff, a trusted colleague of more than twenty years, to lead the analytics practice. Bernie holds a BS from Jacksonville University and works fluently with today's tools, from financial modeling to ChatGPT and Claude.
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Fred Duff, MBA — Principal, Data Analytics & Agentic AI
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Fred Duff leads the analytics and AI side of Dandridge Funding — turning a business's data into clearer decisions. He earned his BA and MBA in Data Analytics from Bellarmine University and completed postgraduate studies in Data Engineering at MIT; AI & Machine Learning and Data Science at the University of Texas at Austin (McCombs); and Applied Generative AI — including agentic AI frameworks — at Purdue. He teaches graduate Data Science and Analytics at Bellarmine's Rubel School of Business, including the MBA Advanced Analytics capstone, and is a founding member of its Data Science Think Tank. And he doesn't just teach it — as a partner at Queen City Mortgage, he builds the tools himself: forecasting models and AI agents that answer market questions in plain English from live data.
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Fred and Bernie go back more than two decades, first working together at Taylor, Bean & Whitaker from 2005 to 2009 — a 21-year friendship that's the foundation of DF's two-door model. Powerful technology, applied by people, never AI alone.
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