Sherpas, an AI-native infrastructure platform for wealth management firms, has raised $3.2m in seed funding.
The round was led by 1248, the family office of Mariner Wealth Advisors Founder & CEO Marty Bicknell, with significant participation from AUA Private Equity Capital, GoHub Ventures, and a group of strategic investors and advisory firms from across the wealth management sector.
Wealth management firms are facing mounting structural pressures. Client expectations continue to rise, financial planning is becoming more complex, and advisers are expected to provide faster, more personalised recommendations. At the same time, many firms still rely on manual processes, fragmented point solutions and time-intensive preparation of financial plans.
Sherpas has positioned its platform as an alternative to layering yet another application onto legacy systems. Instead, it operates as an AI-native foundation embedded within advisory workflows. From investor onboarding through to scenario modelling and drafting recommendations, the system automates analytical tasks and generates structured, explainable outputs in minutes rather than days.
The company emphasises that its technology is designed to enhance, rather than replace, adviser judgement. By standardising the analytical underpinnings of financial plans and investment proposals, the platform aims to deliver consistent rigour and clarity for clients, while allowing advisers to focus on strategic thinking, relationships and higher-conviction decisions.
The funding follows what Sherpas describes as extensive enterprise evaluations within large advisory organisations. During these deployments, the platform was tested in live workflows under compliance and operational supervision. According to the company, these engagements strengthened investor confidence that AI-native infrastructure will become central to the next generation of advisory firms.
Sherpas co-founder and CEO Borja Edo said, “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 round, Steve Lockshin, founder of Vanilla and AdvicePeriod, will join Sherpas’ board of directors.
Lockshin said, “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.”
The newly raised $3.2m will be used to expand the platform’s decision frameworks across retirement, tax, investment and risk planning, while also deepening integrations with enterprise systems used by advisory practices nationwide. The company is focused on accelerating deployment among firms seeking to modernise growth and planning infrastructure without increasing headcount or operational complexity.
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