Sherpas announced the close of a $3.2 million seed funding round to accelerate development of its AI-native operating layer for wealth management firms. The round was led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder and CEO Marty Bicknell, with major participation from AUA Private Equity Capital and GoHub Ventures, as well as strategic investors and advisory firms across the wealth management industry.
The financing comes as advisory firms increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to modernize how financial advice is analyzed, produced, and delivered. Rising client expectations, growing planning complexity, and mounting pressure to provide faster, more personalized recommendations have exposed the limitations of manual workflows and fragmented point solutions that still dominate much of the sector.
Sherpas positions itself not as another planning application layered on top of legacy systems, but as an AI-native operating layer that underpins the advisory workflow. From initial investor intake through scenario modeling and recommendation drafting, the platform automates analytical tasks and produces structured, explainable insights in minutes rather than days.
The company says its aim is not to replace advisors, but to enhance their capabilities. By standardizing the analytical foundation of financial plans and investment proposals, Sherpas seeks to deliver consistent rigor and clarity for clients while freeing advisors to focus on strategy, relationships, and high-conviction decisions.
The seed round follows what the company described as extensive enterprise evaluations across large advisory organizations, where the platform was deployed within real-world workflows under compliance and operations oversight. Those engagements, Sherpas said, reinforced investor conviction that AI-native infrastructure will become foundational to modern advisory firms.
As part of the financing, Steve Lockshin, founder of Vanilla and AdvicePeriod, will join Sherpas’ board of directors. His appointment reflects a broader industry push to rethink how financial decisions are analyzed and delivered at scale.
Sherpas plans to use the new capital to deepen its decision frameworks across retirement, tax, investment, and risk planning, while expanding integrations with enterprise systems used by advisory practices nationwide. The company is focused on accelerating deployment among firms looking to modernize planning and growth infrastructure without adding headcount or operational complexity.
Sherpas describes its platform as AI-native infrastructure designed to standardize how financial advice is analyzed, structured, and delivered, enabling advisory organizations to provide consistent, explainable, and scalable decision-making across clients and teams.
KEY QUOTES
“Financial advice today is still heavily dependent on time and manual analysis. That creates variability that firms don’t always see and can’t scale. Sherpas was built to standardize the analytical foundation of advice, delivering consistent, explainable recommendations in minutes rather than days. The goal isn’t to replace advisors. It’s to remove mechanical work so human judgment can operate at its highest level.”
Borja Edo, Co-Founder and CEO, Sherpas
“Advisory firms are at an inflection point. The next decade won’t be defined by incremental technology upgrades, but by whether firms modernize their operating layer. Sherpas isn’t adding another tool to the stack; it’s building infrastructure that enables advice to be delivered with greater consistency, speed, and scale. That distinction matters.”
Steve Lockshin, Founder, Vanilla and AdvicePeriod; Board Member, Sherpas
