Sherpas, an AI-native infrastructure platform for wealth management, announced the completion of a $3.2 million seed funding round aimed at enhancing its technology for analyzing, producing, and delivering financial advice.
The funding round was led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with significant participation from AUA Private Equity Capital and GoHub Ventures. Strategic investors and advisory firms from the wealth management industry also contributed to the round. This investment comes as advisory firms increasingly adopt artificial intelligence to modernize their operations.
The wealth management industry is currently undergoing a structural shift, characterized by rising client expectations, increasing planning complexity, and pressure on advisors to provide faster, more personalized recommendations. Many firms still depend on manual analysis, fragmented tools, and time-intensive plan preparation. Sherpas aims to address these challenges.
Sherpas operates as an AI-native operating layer for financial advice, rather than a traditional planning application. Its platform automates the analytical process from initial investor intake through scenario modeling and recommendation drafting, producing structured, explainable insights rapidly. The platform is designed to amplify advisor judgment by standardizing the analytical foundation of financial plans and investment proposals, thereby ensuring consistency and clarity for clients while allowing advisors to focus on strategy, relationships, and high-conviction decision-making.
The financing follows extensive enterprise evaluations within large advisory organizations, where Sherpas was deployed in real-world workflows under compliance and operations oversight. These engagements reinforced investor conviction in the foundational role of AI-native infrastructure for modern advisory firms.
Borja Edo, Co-Founder and CEO of Sherpas, stated, “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.”
As part of the funding round, Steve Lockshin, founder of Vanilla and AdvicePeriod, will join Sherpas’ Board of Directors. Lockshin commented, “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.”
Each interaction on the Sherpas platform contributes to its understanding of how advisors refine and apply recommendations, establishing a feedback loop that enhances analysis, advisor judgment, and client outcomes. This continuous learning compounds into institutional knowledge that improves performance across teams over time.
Sherpas plans to utilize the seed capital to deepen its decision frameworks across retirement, tax, investment, and risk planning. The company will also expand integrations with enterprise systems utilized by advisory practices nationwide. Its immediate focus is on accelerating deployment within advisory firms seeking to modernize their growth and planning infrastructure without increasing headcount or operational complexity. As AI continues to reshape the financial services industry, firms that embed intelligence into their operating layer are positioned to gain structural advantages in efficiency, consistency, and client experience.
