Kastle, a start-up building AI agents for financial institutions, has closed a $24m Series A funding round to expand its platform for automating consumer lending operations at banks and other large lenders.
The round was led by Insight Partners, with existing backers Y Combinator and Commerce Ventures returning to participate. Fifth Wall joined as a new investor alongside a group of founders and financial services executives who also backed the raise for the first time.
Kastle’s technology is designed to sit on top of the fragmented, legacy systems that many large financial institutions still rely on, rather than requiring those systems to be replaced outright.
The company argues that a full infrastructure overhaul can take years and carries significant risk, while bolting conventional AI assistants onto old systems only captures a fraction of what the technology can do, leaving a widening gap between what AI can achieve and what most lenders are actually using it for.
Instead, Kastle’s agents are deployed to carry out high-volume, repeatable tasks inside an institution’s existing processes and controls, while staff are freed up to handle the more complex cases that call for judgement and relationship management.
The firm says its agents have already handled more than $1.8bn worth of transactions for some of the world’s largest banks and enterprises, and that this hybrid approach to staffing, blending automated agents with human teams, is becoming the operating model it expects the rest of the industry to adopt.
Kastle builds AI agents for financial services firms, enabling them to automate high-volume work across the technology they already have in place rather than swapping it out for something new.
The company started out focused on consumer lending and has processed more than $2bn in transactions to date. It counts Insight Partners, Y Combinator, Commerce Ventures, Fifth Wall and a number of founders and financial services executives among its backers.
The new funding will go towards growing Kastle’s engineering, product and go-to-market teams, further developing its platform, and speeding up rollouts with banks and other lenders across North America, as institutions look for a realistic way to move from small-scale AI trials to adoption across the business.
Kastle co-founder and CEO Rishi Choudhary said, “For years, enterprises have effectively been presented with a false choice: accept the limitations of legacy operations or endure a long and risky replacement of the systems at the heart of their business. Kastle creates a third path. We give financial institutions an AI workforce that can operate across the systems they already have, so they can capture the benefits of AI now—not five years from now. We believe this will become the safest and fastest way for the world’s largest institutions to become AI-native.”
Choudhary added, “Software gave every employee more tools. AI will give every enterprise more capacity. The winning institutions will be built around hybrid teams that combine the scale and consistency of AI agents with the judgment and relationships of exceptional people. Kastle is building the platform that makes that future possible.”
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