Heron, a startup dedicated to utilizing AI to automate workflows in business lending, equipment finance, and insurance, has announced that it has secured $16 million in Series A funding. The round was led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Y-Combinator, BoxGroup, and Flex Capital. This Series A funding will fuel Heron’s next phase of expansion, enabling the company to scale its AI-driven solutions across additional segments.
While many AI startups target developers or technologists, Heron is at the forefront of deploying AI directly into real-life business operations within traditional industries, such as lending, banking, and insurance. Heron’s core mission is to free up human employees to focus on judgment-based work and complex edge cases, allowing software to handle repetitive, monotonous tasks. The company specifically focuses on serving businesses without large engineering departments, enabling more organizations to benefit from rapid advancements in AI.
Heron’s system can automate time-consuming manual workflows end-to-end, completing tasks automatically or flagging edge cases for human review. This reliability has led many customers to fully offload entire processes to Heron, freeing up their teams for critical work.
For instance, small and medium-sized business (SMB) lenders often employ underwriting analysts who spend hours on repetitive intake work, such as scanning email inboxes for submissions, downloading and renaming files, checking packet completeness, manually entering data into CRMs, and running basic eligibility checks. Using Heron, these hours of work can be accomplished in seconds, with higher accuracy, full auditability, and no manual overhead.
Heron’s focus on reliability and providing end-to-end solutions has attracted over 150 customers, including insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks. The company now processes over 350,000 documents per week. In practical terms, one lender successfully cut its submission-to-decision time by 60%, while an insurer used Heron to automate over 80% of its inbound submission triage.
Founded in 2020 by Dom Kwok, Jamie Parker, and Johannes Jaeckle, Heron launched out of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. Initially building products for financial services companies with earlier generations of AI, the team eventually realized a key insight: traditional industries were drowning in unstructured data and spending millions annually to manage it. In 2023, as large language models (LLMs) matured, Heron pivoted to focus on AI-driven document workflow automation. With minimal outside capital, the team managed to triple annualized revenue in 2024 and has continued to expand its presence in insurance and specialty finance this year.
The new capital will be used to scale Heron’s presence in insurance, equipment finance, and SMB lending, while also expanding into adjacent verticals that have shown demand for Heron’s solution. The company plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams in New York and London, and will continue to invest in internal AI tooling to enable a small team to serve an increasing number of customers.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
“We’ve proven we can win in one segment. Now we’re going workflow by workflow, industry by industry — giving people hours back in their day by eliminating time-intensive manual work.”
Johannes Jaeckle, co-founder and CEO of Heron
“Heron’s AI models with vertical specific context automate the end-to-end data processing workflow, enabling automation and driving competitive differentiation in industries where speed to decisioning is of the essence. Heron’s founding team—Johannes, Jamie, and Dom—are an experienced trio that has proven their ability to adapt and execute. We’re thrilled to partner with them and the entire Heron team as they continue to scale up.”
Philine Huizing, Managing Director at Insight Partners
