Sherpas raises $3.2M Seed Round to scale the AI operating layer for wealth management

KANSAS CITY

Sherpas today announced the close of its $3.2 million seed funding round, led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with major participation from AUA Private Equity Capital, GoHub Ventures, as well as strategic investors and advisory firms from across the wealth management industry. The round comes as advisory firms increasingly adopt AI to modernize how financial advice is analyzed, produced, and delivered.  

Wealth management is entering a structural shift. Client expectations are rising, planning complexity continues to grow, and advisors face mounting pressure to deliver faster, more personalized recommendations. Yet much of the industry still relies on manual analysis, numerous fragmented tools and point solutions, and time-intensive plan preparation.

Sherpas was built to change that operating model.

Rather than functioning as another planning application layered onto legacy systems, Sherpas serves as an AI-native operating layer for financial advice. From initial investor intake through scenario modeling and recommendation drafting, the platform automates the analytical burden, producing structured, explainable insights in minutes rather than days.

The objective is not to replace advisor judgment. It is to amplify it.

By standardizing the analytical foundation of a financial plan and investment proposal, Sherpas ensures that clients receive consistent rigor and clarity while freeing advisors to focus on strategy, relationships, and high-conviction decision-making.

The financing follows extensive enterprise evaluation across large advisory organizations, where Sherpas was deployed within real-world workflows under compliance and operations oversight. Those engagements reinforced investor conviction that AI-native infrastructure will become foundational to modern advisory firms.

“Financial advice today is still heavily dependent on time and manual analysis,” said Borja Edo, Co-Founder and CEO of Sherpas. “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 round, Steve Lockshin, founder of Vanilla, AdvicePeriod, and a long-standing innovator in the wealth management industry, will join Sherpas’ Board of Directors. His involvement signals a shared conviction that advisory firms must re-architect how financial decisions are analyzed and delivered.

“Advisory firms are at an inflection point,” said Lockshin. “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 engagement on the platform strengthens its understanding of how advisors refine and apply recommendations, creating a feedback loop between analysis, advisor judgment, and client outcomes. Over time, that learning compounds into institutional knowledge that improves performance across teams.

Sherpas will use the seed 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 across 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, rather than bolt it onto existing processes, will gain structural advantages in efficiency, consistency, and client experience. Sherpas is positioned to power that transition.

About Sherpas

Sherpas is an AI-native infrastructure platform for wealth management firms. By standardizing how financial advice is analyzed, structured, and delivered, Sherpas enables advisory organizations to provide consistent, explainable, and scalable decision-making across clients and teams.