Saris Raises $28 Million to Bring Agentic AI to Banking

Saris has raised $28.8 million for its agentic workflow platform for financial institutions.

The company’s Series A funding round, announced Monday (June 1), will be used to scale the Saris platform to more banks and credit unions, strengthen integrations with partners like Fiserv, Encompass and MeridianLink, and expand the team that trains and deploys its agents.

“Our vision is a future where humans and AI work side by side in financial services,” Danial Jameel, co-founder and CEO of Saris, said in a news release. “The best institutions won’t replace people; they’ll give people the leverage to do more with less strain and better serve customers and members as a result. Our platform already delivers measurable results, and this funding lets us bring that to more institutions, faster.”

The release argued that the back office of most financial institutions has not kept up with technological change, with lending, compliance and operation teams still spending hours on manual repetitive tasks “that don’t require human judgment.”

Saris said its platform can handle that work so institutions focus on their customers, with its agentic workflows automating the bulk of consumer, mortgage and commercial lending tasks.

PYMNTS wrote last week that while agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to ease some of the burdens facing banks, “challenges, and ultimately liabilities, lie with delegation.”

Automation, that report said, lets a bank accelerate work. Delegation requires that the lender decide which responsibilities can be turned over software and under what circumstances.

“A loan officer may use software to organize a file. An AI agent could be asked to collect missing documents, validate information, identify inconsistencies, request additional materials and prepare the file for final review,” the report continued.

By the same token, PYMNTS said, a “fraud analyst may use technology to identify suspicious activity. An AI agent could assemble account histories, cross-reference customer records, summarize findings and recommend next steps before a human ever enters the process.”

This adoption is also introducing governance challenges “at a time when risk management is already becoming more demanding,” the report added.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the United States” shows that 46% of financial institutions report increasing sophistication in fraud schemes.

Close to half of the executives surveyed by PYMNTS Intelligence and Block pointed to regulatory pressures as a big challenge, while 41% cited pressures tied to faster and more diverse payment systems. And 68% have increased spending on fraud detection capabilities.

“Those figures help explain why discussions surrounding agentic AI frequently return to governance rather than capability,” PYMNTS added.