Heron Secures $16M to Revolutionize Document-Heavy Work with AI Automation

Heron raises $16M to automate document-heavy work - SiliconANGLE

Business automation software startup Heron is looking to take on mundane tasks in the business lending, equipment finance and insurance industries after raising $16 million in its Series A round of funding today. The round was led by Insight Partners and saw the participation of a number of other well-known venture capital backers, including Y Combinator, BoxGroup and Flex Capital. Heron, officially named Open Credit Technologies Inc., says it's at the frontier of deploying artificial intelligence agents into real business operations, with a focus on financial services providers. It believes that its AI agents can take on most of the repetitive, monotonous work involved in banking, lending and insurance, and free up human workers to focus on more complex, judgment-based tasks. What's more, Heron said, it's specifically going after smaller businesses that don't have large engineering departments, with a ready-made agentic platform that can integrate directly into their existing workflows. For instance, it can integrate with Salesforce, Zoho, Cloudsquare, Quickbase, Guidewire, TaskSuite and numerous other popular applications used by financial services providers. The system works somewhat similarly to traditional robotic process automation software, taking time to understand how businesses work, so it can teach itself to automate their most time-consuming manual tasks. Those tasks that it can complete automatically will be done in seconds, but if the system comes up against something it's not sure about, it'll instead flag it for human review, ensuring no mistakes are made. As an example, in the insurance industry, Heron can be put to work on tasks that are typically performed by teams of human workers - such as scanning email inboxes for submissions, downloading and renaming files, manually entering data into forms, checking packet completeness and conducting basic eligibility checks for new claims and policies. The startup says it can accomplish these kinds of tasks in seconds. Heron, which was founded in 2020 after launching out of the Y Combinator accelerator in summer of that year, has been working on AI document workflow automation since before the days of ChatGPT. However, it says it has grown immensely since generative AI burst onto the scene in late 2022, and in the last year claims to have tripled its annual revenue from the year prior. All told, it now has more than 150 customers, including U.S. insurance providers and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured banks, for whom it processes more than 350,000 documents per week. Heron co-founder and Chief Executive Johannes Jaeckle told SiliconANGLE that one of the company's customers - a lender - was able to slash its submission-to-decision time by 60%, while an insurance firm has managed to automate more than 80% of inbound submissions. The key, according to Jaeckle, is that Heron takes the time to understand each customer's workflow and identify which tasks can be automated, and which should be performed by humans. "Anyone who tells you they use AI to automate work with 100% accuracy is probably lying to you," Jaeckle said. "Instead of chasing accuracy, we focus on clearly understanding where our software is successful and where humans still need to review." Armed with its first significant capital infusion, Heron now wants to explore what other industries might be able to benefit from its AI software. "We've proven we can win in one segment," Jaeckle said. "Now we're going workflow by workflow, industry by industry, giving people hours back in their day by eliminating time-intensive manual work." In line with its expansion, Heron also plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, which are currently based in London and New York City, while investing in internal AI tooling to help its employees get more done themselves. Insight Partners Managing Director Philine Huizing said Heron's advantage is that its AI models have so much vertical-specific context, enabling it to know exactly what to automate. "It's driving competitive differentiation in industries where speed to decisioning is of the essence," he said.

Heron Raises $16 Million for Lending Automation Offering | PYMNTS.com

The company's Series A funding round, announced Tuesday (July 15), will let Heron expand its presence in sectors such as insurance, equipment finance and small and medium-sized business (SMB) lending. "Heron's mission is to free up humans to focus on judgment-based work and complex edge cases while software handles the repetitive, monotonous work," the company said in a news release. "Heron focuses on serving companies without large engineering departments, enabling more businesses to reap the rewards of the rapid advances in AI." Heron says its system can automate time-consuming manual workflows, such as the intake work SMB lenders' underwriting analysts might do. This includes things like scanning email inboxes for submissions, downloading and renaming files, and running eligibility checks, things that might take hours but which Heron says its tools can perform in seconds. "Anyone who tells you they use AI to automate work with 100% accuracy is probably lying to you. Instead of chasing accuracy, we focus on clearly understanding where our software is successful and where humans still need to review," said Johannes Jaeckle, co-founder and CEO of Heron. "This allows customers to use Heron in situations where millions of dollars are at stake and reap the rewards of the AI revolution in a reliable fashion that drives business outcomes." The company's new funding follows a season in which earnings reports from lending and insurance platforms provided "evidence that the loan underwriting via automation has expanded credit access and sharpened the identification of credit-worthy customers," as PYMNTS wrote in May. For example, Upstart -- which operates an AI-underpinned lending platform, with banks and institutions on the lenders' side issuing personal loans to borrowers -- had reported that 92% of its loans were fully automated. The company wrote in its earnings materials that with those loans there was "no human intervention by Upstart." CEO Dave Girouard said on an earnings call that new algorithms are successful at "clustering data that have meaningful relationships, allowing seemingly random data to become valuable to predicting credit performance." "Our credit continues to perform well," he added. "All else being equal, we believe a faster automated process selects for better borrowers." Likewise, insurance platform Lemonade said that its vehicle insurance operations were growing, as "proprietary AI (LTV & telematics) pinpoints our target customer -- young, safe drivers -- with precision, offering unbeatable pricing."

AI Startups: Heron Aims to Organize Business Data | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Heron automates the mounds of documents that businesses must manage, including PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, tax returns, bank statements, application documents and schedules. Its platform integrates with Salesforce, Zoho, Cloudsquare and Tasksuite, among other applications. Heron aims to help teams reduce manual work, enabling them to scale without adding staff. According to a press release announcing the new funding, the firm has already processed 350,000 documents a week for more than 150 customers. Heron said small and medium-sized business (SMB) lenders have teams of underwriting analysts that spend hours scanning emails, downloading files, checking packets for completeness and manually entering data into CRMs and check for basic eligibility. Focusing on companies that don't have large engineering departments, Heron's system completes tasks automatically or flags cases that need further review by human staff. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, BoxGroup and Flex Capital. The startup, part of the 2020 Y Combinator summer cohort, said it will use the funds to scale in the insurance, equipment finance and SMB lending markets while expanding into adjacent industries. Heron also plans to hire more engineers and staff in New York and London. Read more: Meta to Make a Bid for Voice AI Startup PlayAI Global FinTech startups participated in 390 funding rounds worth $11 billion in the second quarter, according to data S&P Global Market Intelligence shared with PYMNTS. That is a 22% increase in value year over year, but a 13% decline in the number of funding rounds. In North America, funding rose by 150% to $8 billion in the quarter, while deal count grew 5%, from 171 to 180. EMEA was the worst performer, with funding falling by more than 50% to $1.6 billion. Latin America also didn't do well: Funding value fell 34% to $400 million. Asia-Pacific, however, was "relatively stable" at $1.4 billion, S&P Global said. By segments, payments startups saw a 37% increase in funding to $2.6 billion in Q2 from the prior quarter. The number of rounds rose by 10% to 115. Cross-border payments drew major interest, with more than 10 deals. "Fintech funding is showing early signs of a rebound in 2025 after three straight years of decline. If the current pace holds, this year could mark a turning point in overall funding value," Sampath Sharma Nariyanuri, senior fintech research analyst at S&P Global, said in the report. See also: Robinhood CEO's AI Math Wiz Valued at $900M OpenRouter has raised $40 million in a combined seed and Series A funding round led by VC powerhouses Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sequoia as well as angel investors. The 2-year-old startup provides a platform that makes it easy for companies to use many different AI models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, without having to build custom tools for each one. Instead of connecting to each AI provider separately, companies can use OpenRouter as a single access point. The platform offers access to more than 400 AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek and others. The company said it also helps businesses track their AI usage, manage costs and keep systems running smoothly -- even if one provider has a problem. Revenue has grown tenfold from $10 million in October 2024 to a $100 million run rate as of May 2025. Over 1 million developers use it. OpenRouter is integrated with Microsoft VSCode, Zapier, Cloudflare, Make.com, n8n, Posthog and more. Read more: AI Startups: What OpenAI, Anthropic Pay Their Technical Staff Amazon Reportedly Mulling New Multibillion-Dollar Anthropic Investment