By Rajwa Quasim
Kastle, an applied AI company focused on financial services, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round. The San Francisco-based company was founded by Rishi Choudhary and Nitish Poddar.
The company developed KastleOS, an AI agent operating platform for consumer lending designed to automate work across the entire loan lifecycle, allowing lenders to increase capacity and grow their businesses.
Insight Partners led the funding round, with existing investors Y Combinator and Commerce Ventures returning. Fifth Wall also joined the round as a new investor.
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Banks and other lenders are increasingly exploring AI to automate repetitive tasks and improve productivity. However, replacing core lending systems can take years and add significant migration and operational risks.
Kastle is taking a different approach by building AI agents that operate on top of the infrastructure financial institutions already use. Its agents can handle high-volume operations while employees continue to oversee more complex cases.
“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,” said Rishi Choudhary, co-founder and CEO of Kastle.
The platform will initially focus on consumer lending, where loan applications and related processes involve large amounts of repetitive work. Kastle says its agents have already processed more than $1.8 billion in transactions.
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Beyond productivity, banks need AI systems that can operate reliably while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements and integrating with existing systems.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said, “Kastle deploys AI agents that can navigate complexity, pass the bar on regulatory rigor, and get high-stakes work done without waiting for a multiyear transformation. We’re thrilled to partner with the Kastle team as they continue to reshape this category.”
The company plans to use the new capital to expand its presence among North American financial institutions, grow its engineering, product and go-to-market teams, and accelerate deployments.