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

they will say, "Right this way, sir." Like, "You can go to New York City. It It's much easier." Anyway,

Gabe says, "If I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a MSAD super agent on an undercover mission." Which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post, so not sure what happens next, but I picked that one. And Sean Frank agrees with us. Darren Gap first. Uh anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Denal. Uh

are we back?

How you doing?

Yeah.

Oh, we're back.

I'm I'm well.

Fantastic. Folks,

let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened?

Uh sure. I'm Daniel. I'm uh founder CEO of SARS AI. Uh we build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions focused on the back office. It's sort of the unsung heroes of, you know, any company in the back office.

Um, so we're helping automate a lot of that tedious complex tasks that, you know, the humans don't enjoy. So, yeah.

So, how how diffuse is your customer base? Because, uh, credit unions, I mean, I feel like there's there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in the United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. Um, is that your goal to be, I guess, like more like mid-market versus like we're going straight to JP Morgan and and we're going to be at that level on day one? Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, we are working with one of the larger GIF banks, but to be honest, it's it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with a particular story or a segment of the market.

Sure.

And as we put it right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8,000 of them all across the US

and they're serving, you know, uh, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. it's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage or we have another customer in uh Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans. So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the the heart of the economy. So, which is kind of cool.

And how much of the business is like I mean, we're already in unsexy territory. Let's get unsexy. How much of the business is like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems because I mean I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that getting that into something that's uh you know interpretable from any computer system. It it seems like it's still a challenge.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this uh story. Uh the first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy.

Yeah.

Um you know especially with foundational models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect

humans you know the work that humans do.

Yeah. with the regulatory environment with the infrastructure with integrations with systems not everything is API accessible with semistructured unstructured data like you said you know papers and so on that orchestration that's where the magic is and I think that's where the boat is for a lot of startups uh to come in because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear

foundation models will probably figure that out so I think that's the first part the second part of the story is more human again and it's what we call or what I call the dignity of work right so I'll share a story with you like we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on but let me share some stories on the ground right so we have one one of our customers uh their team had a backlog of 300 certain documents and they are literally spending the time from 5:00 p.m. till 9:30 p.m. 5 days a week.

Mhm.

Completing that backlog because 9:00 in the morning they have to get to another backlog.

Yeah.

We launched ours about like 3 weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6:20. They can be with their families. Right. That's dignity of work. That's amazing. We have another case where um you know we it's it's it's loans and more.

That's what happened with other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank. Yeah. Right.

Which is great. Just more efficiency higher productivity which is the good news.

Uh exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So the so so we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is u you know we've had a case where the president of a credit union sent me a text hey we were planning hiring five people uh this quarter.

Yeah.

But because the output of with with SARS is so much higher they didn't hire those five people. However they gave a raise to the existing team and everyone's happier about that. Right. So, so those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing.

Okay. Give us the fundraising news cuz we're running late. What What did you raise? Who who who funded you?

Yeah. So, it was uh I guess love at first sight with a partner. We raised $28.8 million in the season. Nice.

Congratulations.

What What partner led the deal?

Uh uh it was Alex, man. It was at first sight. And then and then we got to meet with Joe as well. who's who's just an awesome guy, too. So, uh it was great.

That's great news. Well, sorry uh for