The Power of LLMs
In the first year of starting Heron with my co-founders Dom and Jamie, we very quickly understood the power of LLMs. We had spent 10 months writing thousands of heuristics and regexes for our first product, a categorisation engine for bank transaction data, used mainly by B2B Fintechs. With nearly a million rows of labelled data, Dom went to re-train an open-source transformer model (LLM) to do the categorisation instead. He trained it overnight, we tried it the next day, and the results were astonishing: High accuracy and a human-like understanding of language. We closed our laptops and went to the pub, feeling like we had just witnessed magic.
The story of Heron since that day has been to translate the enormous advances in LLMs since into actual benefits for our customers. Abstracting away all the complexity, and delivering what is invented in Silicon Valley to companies across the country.
The AI Revolution is Killing Traditional Fundraising Milestones
A consequence of starting a company in this technological earthquake has been that traditional metrics for fundraising have gone out of the window. In a traditional scenario, a B2B SaaS company would have raised a Series A at $1M in revenue, following that up with a Series B at $3-5M. Because we have a truly AI-first product and by using AI tools internally for productivity, we never burnt much money and have turned accidentally profitable on occasion.
This has allowed us, and other companies like us, to go further with less money: We went past $1M ARR with 3 founders and 2 employees, and raised a small small seed extension when passing $3M ARR. This shift is amazing for builders, allowing employees and founders to own more of our companies for much longer.
Why We’re Raising Now
Over the last year, our conviction in our company vision has only grown: As Heron is being used for more and more workflows across financial services, we are more convinced than ever that many of the repetitive parts of white collar work will disappear in the next decade. Combine that with our ever-increasing awe and astonishment at the improvements made by the latest LLMs, and we believe that the time to go full-speed is now.
Making this vision become a reality takes a long-term partner. Philine Huizing and Insight Partners have a world-class track record in scaling B2B companies, and we’re excited to partner with them.
What Comes Next
We’re proud to serve 150 customers across FDIC-insured banks, insurers and equipment financers today. To scale our impact from here to more segments and customers, we will, above all else, hire great people. At Heron, we believe in outsized responsibility, learning by doing and extreme customer focus. If you’d like to join us, we’re hiring especially across Sales and Engineering both in New York and London.
Thank you to everyone who’s been part of Heron’s journey so far — our early customers, our growing team, our investors, and countless supporters behind the scenes.
If you’re a business drowning in documents: Let’s talk!