Maximum Emerges From Stealth With $30 Million to Build AI Banking OS

Maximum emerged from stealth Monday (Aug. 3) and said it raised $30 million in a seed round to build an artificial intelligence (AI)-native operating system for banks.

Maximum Founder Randy Fernando previously founded the FinTech companies Vault and Power and sold Vault to Acorns in 2017 and Power to Marqeta in 2023, the company said in a Monday press release.

At the time of the acquisitions, PYMNTS described Vault as a developer of retirement fund investment services, and Power as a card management platform.

Operators who helped build Fernando’s previous companies make up the team at Maximum, and investors who funded those earlier ventures are backing the new company, according to the release.

“The advancement of AI is creating a paradigm shift in financial services, and banks can’t keep pace by relying on legacy providers,” Fernando said in the release. “Maximum will provide banks with ultimate control, powerful agentic capabilities and the tools to innovate, enabling them to deliver exceptional new experiences to their customers and partners.”

Maximum has developed a platform that is powered by AI at a foundational level, which enables banks to build and deploy custom agents, gain real-time visibility into customer activity, deliver innovative financial products and better manage risk at a time when AI is exposing new vulnerabilities to the banking industry, according to the release.

Maximum plans to work with banks of all sizes, the release said.

With the new funding, Maximum will accelerate product development, expand its engineering and operations teams, and support bank implementations with its existing customers, per the release.

Maximum’s seed round was led by CRV.

Caitlin Bolnick Rellas, general partner at CRV, said in the release that banking technology has reached a point at which incremental improvements are no longer enough.

“Randy has repeatedly identified foundational shifts before the broader market, and we’re excited to back him for a second time as Maximum builds what we believe will become the operating system for the next generation of banking,” Bolnick Rellas said.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Services Pull Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race” found that financial services firms are “going all in on AI” and have deeply embedded the technology into tasks such as revenue recognition, credit scoring and sales forecasting.