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.

Image: Heron