Saris AI announces $28.8M Series A

A few months ago, I visited a credit union where the lending team was staying until 9 p.m. every night just to get through their work. Not because they were understaffed or slow. The back office–the document review, the data validation, the reconciliation across systems that don't talk to each other–had become more than a full-time job on top of their actual job.

That story is not unique. It's the rule, not the exception, at banks and credit unions across the country.

Last month, we announced our $28.8 million Series A, led by 8VC, with participation from Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures. While this is the first of many milestones for us, the more important news is what it means for the institutions we serve.

The work hasn't changed in decades

According to McKinsey, back-office operations account for 15% to 20% of a financial institution's operating budget, driving total global back-office spending to an estimated $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion annually. A single loan file still takes 10 to 20 hours to process. Most of that time is spent on manual document review, data validation, and reconciliation across systems that don't talk to each other.

The largest banks have been spending billions a year on AI to solve this. Your local community bank or credit union does not have the same budgets to experiment, build, or buy. The problems still exist for them, but no one has built specifically for them, until now.

What we built

Saris isn't a chatbot or a copilot. It's an operational layer of AI agents that integrates directly into your existing operations. Our agents are trained on the institution's specific systems, processes, and policies. They log into the platforms staff already use (the LOS, the core, the document repository), read documents, complete compliance checks, move data across workflows, and draft customer communications. While every action is logged, humans ultimately make the final call on anything that requires their judgment.

This is work that pre-AI automation could never do. Loan files have unstructured documents, context that shifts from one application to the next, and decisions that need reasoning, not rules. Agentic AI is what makes this possible.

What's happening with our customers

While we're just getting started, our early customers have already felt the impact. One credit union cleared a 600-loan backlog in four days using Saris agents. Loan processes that used to take 90 minutes or more now finish in just 7 minutes. Another institution processed more than 500 checks in minutes with 99.8% accuracy. Employees who used to stay until 9 p.m. to finish their work are now done by 6 p.m.

Across our customer base, banks and credit unions are tripling output without additional headcount. The institutions running Saris are using the leverage they get back to invest in the people they have, the people they serve, and the communities they're part of. Employees report higher job satisfaction. For one of our customers, the time and cost savings funded considerable raises for the team.

Where we're going

This funding marks the beginning of our next chapter. We’re expanding deployments across banks and credit unions, deepening integrations with the systems financial institutions rely on every day, and continuing to advance the research and technology that will shape the future of agentic AI in financial services.

Most importantly, we’re investing in our team. Saris exists because of the people building it: the engineers, operators, researchers, and customer partners who care deeply about the problems we're solving for the industry. As we grow, we're committed to preserving the culture that got us here: high performance, high care, and an obsession with delivering value to our customers.

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