Tyler Maran and Anna Pojawis’ startup had paying customers, growing traction, and $3.2 million in seed funding. Then, they decided the vision for it wasn’t big enough.
A year ago, the duo began to question whether OmniAI — which used AI to analyze business data — could become the company they wanted to build. Maran told Business Insider it led to a hard realization: “We really didn’t see where the full $10 billion, $100 billion vision was here,” he said.
The founders, who are alums of the famed startup accelerator Y Combinator, scrapped OmniAI and have spent the past 10 months quietly building the banking AI agent startup Monumint instead — despite the revenue losses that came with sunsetting the former product.
Late last year, after landing early customers for Monumint, Maran and Pojawis shared a pitch deck with existing investors to get them formally aligned around the company’s new direction and pave the way for future fundraising.
The response was “overwhelmingly positive,” Maran said. He added that investors, many of whom had experience in financial services, helped make introductions, including one that could become one of Monumint’s largest customers.
The new company marks something of a return to their roots. Before becoming software engineers and cofounders, Pojawis and Maran started their careers as commercial bankers at the Canadian banking giant CIBC, where they met in an analyst training program nearly a decade ago.
Both had entrepreneurial aspirations, Maran said, and they later reconnected after joining separate YC-backed software startups. As generative AI took off, they decided to create a company together and went through YC with Omni in 2024.
Monumint builds conversational AI agents for banks, credit unions, and lenders. The agents answer questions, collect information, and can handle complex workflows, such as coordinating loan applications with multiple business owners and updating beneficiaries, Maran said.
The startup has 20 paying customers, including small-business lenders Lendio and ByzFunder, as well as several FDIC-insured banks, such as Community Bank, Maran said.
The company has six employees and says it plans to use the funds to grow its engineering and sales teams.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck Monumint used to pitch its new direction to investors, which included FundersClub, Y Combinator, and Imagination Capital. Slides have been redacted so that the deck can be shared publicly.
