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

Led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with participation from AUA Private Equity Capital, GoHub Ventures, and strategic investors from across the advisory industry.

SEED FOUNDING ROUND

$3.2M

The round comes as advisory firms increasingly adopt AI to modernize how financial advice is analyzed, produced, and delivered — and as the market signals that AI-native infrastructure is becoming foundational to the future of wealth management.

INVESTORS & STRATEGIC PARTNERS

1248

Family office of Marty Bicknell, Founder & CEO of Mariner Wealth Advisors (Lead Investor)

Lead investor

AUA Private Equity

Growth capital for technology companies

GoHub Ventures

European venture capital

BOARD ADDITION

Steve Lockshin joins the Board of Directors

Founder of Vanilla and AdvicePeriod, and one of the most recognized innovators in wealth management.

Why now

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, fragmented tools, and time-intensive plan preparation.

The recent market reaction to AI developments in wealth management — including significant stock drops across major financial services firms — underscores what we've believed from the beginning: AI is not a feature. It's a new operating layer for advisory firms.

What Sherpas is building

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, Sherpas ensures that clients receive consistent rigor and clarity while freeing advisors to focus on strategy, relationships, and high-conviction decision-making.

"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."

Borja Edo, Co-Founder and CEO of Sherpas

Enterprise-tested, investor-backed

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.

"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."

Steve Lockshin, Board Member, Sherpas

What's next

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 planning infrastructure without increasing headcount or operational complexity.

As AI continues to reshape financial services, 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.