Announcing Our Investment in Saris AI

At 8VC, we've spent over a decade investing in companies that bring operational intelligence to complex industries. Palantir demonstrated something foundational: raw data isn't enough to run an organization. You need to map the structure of how a business actually operates, on top of the data, to drive decisions at scale. That insight created hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise value and reshaped how corporations and governments approach operations.

We saw a direct extension of that thesis when we backed Blend, founded by our friend and former Palantir colleague Nima Ghamsari. Blend brought digital infrastructure to mortgage lending and proved that automation could unlock enormous value in financial services. But Blend also revealed a ceiling: Financial institutions run on fragmented legacy software (i.e. core banking platforms, loan origination systems, document repositories, email clients), which limits the efficacy of any automation layer. Solving it requires a fundamentally different approach that works across those systems natively, rather than asking institutions to work around these systems or adopt something new. 

These earned insights led us to Danial, Alice, and James at Saris, and we’re proud to announce our partnership with the team. Saris meets financial institutions exactly where they are and automates the complex, multi-turn back-office workflows that prior generations of technology couldn’t touch. RPA automated clicks. Saris automates work.

Saris Platform

While most of the market has focused on front-office AI (i.e. chatbots, decisioning models, customer-facing agents), the back office is where the real operational cost sits. There are roughly 700,000 back-office employees across 8,300 banks and credit unions in the US, representing $50B in salary spend, executing workflows that are manual but far from simple. A mortgage lending process can involve 50 or more steps spanning document intake, insurance verification, compliance checks, and data validation across multiple desktop and web-based systems, many of which lack APIs.

Saris built an agentic workflow platform that orchestrates and executes these workflows end-to-end. The system operates through a native desktop application with direct bindings to the software financial institutions actually run on, rather than relying on screenshot-based computer-use agents that lock the user's screen or brittle clickstream-based RPA. When something fails mid-workflow, specialized self-healing agents diagnose the issue and picks up the workflow where things left off. When a step downstream reveals a problem upstream, the system loops back to fix it and skips forward – the kind of non-linear, multi-turn execution that traditional sequential automation structurally cannot do.

Business users manage workflows directly, without IT or engineering bottleneck for configuration or troubleshooting, and the desktop remains fully usable while workflows run. This level of granularity and robustness is make or break for efficacy and daily adoption in highly regulated, high inertia financial services.

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The Team

Saris was founded by Danial Jameel, James Dang, and Alice Dinu, who have worked together for over a decade. They dropped out of college to build Ready Education, a YC-backed student engagement platform they grew and successfully exited, and have come back to do it again in a domain where the operational complexity and scale of opportunity are significantly higher. The team is building across San Francisco and Montreal, and as a proud Canadian myself, I'm excited to support this talented group. 

What has impressed us most is how deeply Saris understands the workflows it seeks to automate – mapping out 50-plus-step lending, verification, and compliance processes with real domain expertise. That upfront investment compounds: roughly 75% of workflow definitions overlap across institutions due to regulatory standardization, making every deployment transferable to the next. This is what turns a consultative services business into a scalable product company, and it inverts typical financial services deployment timelines.

Traction and the Opportunity Ahead

Saris has grown rapidly since launching across a customer base that ranges from mid-size credit unions to the largest banks in North America. Sales cycles are short for the segment, customers are signing without pilots, and Saris is turning typical financial services deployment cycles on their head. Where industry standards for solutions addressing these workflows often take 6 to 12 months, deploying Saris is closer to provisioning a new user – customers are live in 90 days with no dedicated implementation engineering staff. 

The ROI is not incremental. Customers are seeing workflow execution times drop by orders of magnitude, processing costs fall dramatically, and lending team output multiply –  often more than doubling with the same headcount. At a trillion-dollar institution, Saris has demonstrated roughly $28M in combined annual ROI across just three teams.

Critically, this isn't about eliminating roles. Institutions are using the capacity Saris unlocks to shift staff from back-office processing to front-office work –  serving members, deepening relationships, growing business lines. The work becomes more human-scale, and these organizations can double down on serving their communities.

But the bigger picture is what excites us. Saris is building toward something larger than workflow automation. By facilitating access to the full constellation of systems a financial institution runs on (i.e. core banking, lending, compliance, deposits, payments), Saris is positioning itself as the control plane for financial operations. Not RPA, but a true system of action.

We've seen this pattern before in horizontal data and operability platforms that build deep in one vertical and discover the market is far larger than the initial wedge suggested. The principles that underpin companies like Palantir and Fiserv – accumulate operational context across systems, make that context actionable, become the layer everything else runs through – apply directly here. Financial services, with its $50B in back-office salary spend and $495B in total technology spend across thousands of institutions in the US, the opportunity is enormous.

Saris x 8VC

Today, Saris announced its $28.8 million Series A led by 8VC, with participation from Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, BankTech Ventures, and Service Credit Union. We're proud to partner with Danial, James, and Alice as they rapidly expand across financial institutions nationwide, deepen their penetration of financial operations end-to-end, and grow the team. 

To learn more, visit saris.ai. If you're interested in joining their team, check out their open roles.