Across traditional industries like insurance, lending, and finance, teams are buried under mountains of paperwork and manual data entry. Analysts spend hours extracting, validating, and retyping information from unstructured documents—a process that slows decisions, increases errors, and drives a global spend exceeding $300 billion on business process outsourcing (BPO).

In an exclusive interview with TFN, Johannes Jaeckle, co-founder and CEO of Heron, explains, “Many industries still rely on human teams to process unstructured documents, creating a $300B+ global spend on business process outsourcing. In insurance and lending, analysts manually extract, validate, and retype data from submissions, slowing decisions and increasing error rates. Heron automates these workflows end-to-end, currently processing over 350,000 documents per week. One customer cut submission-to-decision time by 60%; another scaled revenue 4x without hiring.”

Heron’s AI-powered platform automates these document-centric workflows from start to finish. The system reads inbound emails, classifies and prioritises submissions, extracts and validates hundreds of data points, and syncs everything seamlessly to CRMs or loan origination platforms. This enables businesses to offload repetitive work and focus on higher-value, judgment-based tasks.

Heron recently raised $16.6 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, BoxGroup, and Flex Capital. This brings Heron’s total funding to $23.3 million. The company has not disclosed its current valuation.

The new capital will help Heron scale its AI-driven solutions to more segments and expand its engineering and go-to-market teams in New York and London, while investing in internal AI tooling to serve its rapidly growing customer base.

Founders’ background and the Heron journey

Heron was founded in 2020 by Johannes Jaeckle, Dom Kwok, and Jamie Parker. Jaeckle leads as CEO, bringing experience as Managing Director & CEO at Taptap Send, a fintech unicorn focused on remittances, and as UK Managing Director at Segovia Technology, a cross-border payments company that went public after merging with Crown Agents Bank.

Jamie Parker, Heron’s Chief Revenue Officer, previously led a $10 million-plus P&L at AlphaSights, a high-growth B2B services company. Notably, Johannes and Jamie also ran a White Tie Hire shop together out of their student house at Oxford.

Dom Kwok, Heron’s Chief Technology Officer, was previously Head of Data Science at Revolut, where he helped scale one of the world’s most valuable fintechs. Earlier in his career, he worked at Facebook and Spotify, and at Yale, he won the DeForest Pioneer Prize for his work on quantum computing.

Jaeckle recalls the company’s origins: “We started the company because we were friends fascinated with technology and startups. Our primary motivation was to go on a journey together, not to solve a problem from personal experience. In 2020, we began building with LLMs, which were niche at the time.

By the time ChatGPT captured public attention in November 2022, we had already spent two years building LLM-based products for financial services companies. This early experience helped us understand the power of LLMs, and we became obsessed with bringing AI to real businesses across America.”

Heron’s mission is to give white-collar teams their time back, as Jaeckle puts it, “save a lifetime of boring, repetitive work every day.” The company believes AI’s most significant impact won’t come from replacing humans but from liberating them. By automating grunt work, inbox triage, document extraction, eligibility checks, and form filling, Heron enables teams to focus on judgment-based tasks and high-stakes decisions.

Diversity is a core value at Heron. While the company doesn’t publish formal statistics, its team includes people from all six continents and a wide range of backgrounds. Jaeckle notes, “We value diverse perspectives across nationality, gender, and experience. We’re proud to have women in key roles across Heron, from engineering to sales. We believe diverse perspectives are essential to building great products and a strong culture.”

What makes Heron so special? 

Heron’s technology goes far beyond surface-level document parsing. While most tools in this space stop at basic optical character recognition (OCR) or generic intelligent document processing (IDP) systems, Heron acts as a vertically integrated AI agent handling entire workflows. The platform uses domain-specific prompting and evaluation, with AI prompts and robust frameworks refined for each document type, use case, and customer workflow. Heron’s models are trained and validated against thousands of documents, allowing the company to tune for edge cases and speciality formats that generic models miss.

The system checks, corrects, and applies business rules to every data point, enabling customers to offload tasks fully that they would otherwise need to triple-check manually. Importantly, Heron flags uncertainty so humans can step in when needed.

Jaeckle is clear: “Anyone who tells you they use AI to automate work with 100% accuracy is probably lying to you. Instead of chasing accuracy, we focus on clearly understanding where our software is successful and where humans still need to review. This allows customers to use Heron in situations where millions of dollars are at stake and reap the rewards of the AI revolution in a reliable fashion that drives business outcomes.”

What truly sets Heron apart is its end-to-end ownership of outcomes. Customers are outsourcing a manual workflow to a system that gets smarter, faster, and more useful every day.

Heron’s main competitor remains the status quo: teams manually processing documents or businesses relying on outsourced BPOs and patchwork automation tools. While some software solutions handle parts of the process, few offer true end-to-end workflow automation with the reliability required for high-stakes industries.

Scaling the AI revolution

Heron is already making a significant impact. The company processes over 350,000 documents weekly for more than 150 customers, including insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks. One lender cut submission-to-decision time by 60%, while an insurer automated over 80% of its inbound submission triage. Another customer scaled revenue fourfold without hiring additional staff.

Looking ahead, Heron aims to deepen its presence in SMB lending, insurance, and equipment finance, while expanding into adjacent industries such as procurement, hedge funds, and legal. The company is building dedicated vertical teams and investing in AI tooling to improve accuracy, speed, and automation.

Jaeckle says, “Ultimately, we’re going industry by industry, workflow by workflow, replacing busywork with reliable AI so humans can focus on higher-value work involving judgment.”

Heron’s mission is to enable legacy industries to compete with tech companies by letting them harness AI benefits. As Jaeckle summarises, “While many AI startups focus on building tools for developers or researchers, Heron concentrates on the real economy: insurance carriers, lenders, and operations teams buried in PDFs and inboxes.

Our mission is to take the power of AI and apply it to the everyday, unglamorous work that still drives how business gets done across America. With this funding, we’re scaling that impact, helping more companies reclaim time, reduce overhead, and modernise without needing an army of engineers.”