Saris Raises $28.8 Million to Bring Agentic AI to Banking and Credit Unions

Saris Raises $28.8 Million to Scale Agentic AI Across Financial Institutions

Agentic artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from a buzzword into a core operational reality for financial institutions. The latest signal of this shift comes from Saris, a company building an agentic workflow platform designed specifically for banks and credit unions. Saris has announced a $28.8 million Series A funding round, a milestone that underscores the growing appetite among investors and financial institutions alike for AI solutions that go well beyond simple chatbots and basic automation tools.

What Is Saris and What Does Its Platform Do?

Saris is an agentic workflow platform purpose-built for the financial services sector. Unlike general-purpose AI tools that require significant customization before they can be deployed in a regulated environment, Saris was designed from the ground up with the operational realities of banks and credit unions in mind. Its platform deploys AI agents capable of autonomously executing complex, multi-step workflows across lending, compliance, and operations departments.

The core promise of the Saris platform is straightforward: take the repetitive, time-consuming back-office tasks that currently consume hours of skilled employees' time and handle them autonomously, without sacrificing accuracy or compliance. This includes automating consumer lending workflows, mortgage processing pipelines, and commercial lending operations — areas where manual effort has historically been both expensive and error-prone.

By doing so, Saris allows the human professionals inside these institutions to redirect their attention toward higher-judgment work — serving customers, building relationships, and making the kinds of nuanced decisions that genuinely require human expertise.

The Details Behind the $28.8 Million Series A

The Series A funding round was announced on June 1, 2026. According to the company, the capital will be deployed across three primary priorities. First, Saris plans to scale its platform to a significantly larger number of banks and credit unions, accelerating the geographic and institutional reach of its agentic workflows. Second, the company intends to deepen and strengthen its integrations with key industry partners, including Fiserv, Encompass, and MeridianLink — platforms already deeply embedded in the daily operations of financial institutions across the country. Third, Saris will expand the team responsible for training and deploying its AI agents, ensuring that each institution that adopts the platform gets the tailored configuration and support it needs.

Danial Jameel, co-founder and CEO of Saris, captured the company's philosophy in a statement accompanying the announcement: "Our vision is a future where humans and AI work side by side in financial services. 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."

Why the Back Office of Banking Is Ripe for Disruption

To understand why a platform like Saris is attracting significant investor interest, it helps to understand the operational reality inside most financial institutions today. Despite decades of digital transformation initiatives and significant investment in core banking technology, the back office of the average bank or credit union remains remarkably manual. Lending teams, compliance officers, and operations staff routinely spend hours each day on repetitive tasks that involve pulling data from multiple systems, formatting documents, verifying information, and routing files through approval chains.

These are not tasks that require deep human judgment. They are procedural, rule-based, and time-consuming. Yet they consume a disproportionate share of the bandwidth of highly trained professionals whose skills and attention would be far better directed elsewhere. The consequence is twofold: operational costs remain high, and employees experience significant cognitive fatigue from work that feels disconnected from the parts of their job they find most meaningful.

Saris argues — and the evidence from early deployments supports — that agentic AI is the right tool to address this gap. Unlike robotic process automation (RPA), which follows rigid scripts and breaks when processes change, agentic AI can adapt, reason, and handle the kind of variation that characterizes real-world financial workflows.

Agentic AI in Banking: Beyond the Hype

The broader conversation around agentic AI in banking has intensified considerably over the past year. Financial institutions are increasingly recognizing that the first generation of AI deployments — largely focused on customer-facing chatbots and basic fraud detection models — delivered only a fraction of the potential value that AI can bring to financial services. The next frontier is agentic AI: systems that don't just respond to queries but autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks on behalf of the institution.

However, this shift also introduces new questions about governance, accountability, and oversight. As AI systems take on greater operational responsibility, institutions must think carefully about how decisions are reviewed, how errors are caught and corrected, and how regulatory requirements around explainability and auditability are satisfied. Saris appears to be positioning its platform with these concerns in mind, building integrations with existing enterprise systems that allow institutions to maintain visibility and control over what their agents are doing.

Strategic Integrations: Fiserv, Encompass, and MeridianLink

One of the most significant aspects of Saris's go-to-market strategy is its emphasis on deep integrations with the platforms that financial institutions already use. By building native connections with Fiserv — one of the largest financial technology providers in the world — as well as Encompass, a widely used mortgage origination platform, and MeridianLink, a leading consumer and commercial lending software provider, Saris is positioning its agents to slot into existing workflows rather than requiring institutions to rip and replace their technology stacks.

This approach significantly lowers the barrier to adoption. Financial institutions are notoriously conservative when it comes to technology change, and for good reason: the stakes of a system failure or data error in a regulated environment are extremely high. An agentic AI platform that works within the systems banks already trust is far easier to deploy and gain internal approval for than a standalone solution that requires extensive integration work.

What This Means for the Future of Financial Services

The Saris funding round is one data point in a broader pattern of investment and innovation that is reshaping how financial institutions operate. As agentic AI matures and the early deployments demonstrate measurable ROI — in time saved, errors reduced, and employee satisfaction improved — the pace of adoption is likely to accelerate significantly.

• Banks and credit unions that invest in agentic workflow automation today are likely to build meaningful operational advantages over those that delay adoption.
• The institutions that succeed will be those that treat AI not as a replacement for their people, but as a tool that amplifies what their people can accomplish.
• Regulatory clarity around AI accountability in banking will be a critical factor in determining the pace and shape of this transformation over the next several years.

With $28.8 million in fresh capital and a growing roster of financial institution clients, Saris is well-positioned to be one of the defining companies in this space. The question for every bank and credit union executive is no longer whether agentic AI will reshape their back office — it is how quickly they want to be part of that transformation.