Saris AI raises $28.8M to automate bank and credit union back-office workflows

Saris AI has raised $28.8M led by 8VC, where partner Alex led the deal with co-founder Joe Lonsdale also involved. The company builds AI workflow agents for the back-office operations of banks and credit unions — roughly 8,000 institutions across the US that Danial Jameel describes as the financial backbone serving rural lenders, first-time homebuyers, and agricultural borrowers.

The pitch isn't digitization for its own sake. Jameel argues the real product is orchestration — connecting human workflows, regulatory requirements, legacy infrastructure, and semi-structured data like physical documents into something an AI agent can actually act on. Point solutions, in his view, will get commoditized by foundation models. The moat is in the connective tissue.

“I'm Daniel. I'm founder and CEO of Sirus AI. We build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions focused on the back office... We raised $28,800,000... We have one of our customers — their team had a backlog of 300 loan documents, and they are literally spending the time from 5PM till 09:30PM, five days a week. We launched ours about three weeks ago. Now they're going home at 06:20. They can be with their families.”

On the ground impact

The early case studies are specific. One customer's team was processing a backlog of 300 loan documents from 5PM to 9:30PM, five days a week, just to keep pace with the next morning's queue. Three weeks after deploying Saris, they were leaving at 6:20PM. A credit union president texted Jameel to say they had planned to hire five people this quarter but didn't — and instead gave raises to the existing team.

The pattern Jameel is seeing isn't mass layoffs. It's a hiring freeze on backfill roles, with productivity gains absorbed by the existing workforce rather than headcount expansion.

Saris is working with at least one GSIB-tier bank, though Jameel's sharper conviction is in the community bank and credit union segment, where the volume of institutions and the underinvestment in automation creates a long, defensible runway.