While lenders have digitized loan origination, the infrastructure behind collections, compliance, and customer support remained labor-intensive.
That gap is what drew investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Y Combinator to back Salient. The San Francisco startup, founded in 2023, uses AI to replace phone-based agents and compliance monitors with software. It just raised $60 million to address what investors see as one of the last unsolved bottlenecks in consumer finance.
The new capital brings Salient’s valuation to $350 million and will be used to expand its AI-powered platform deeper into downstream loan servicing workflows, including credit disputes, title management, and complaint resolution.
Loan Servicing Bottleneck Became a Startup Blueprint
Salient co-founder and CEO Ari Malik started thinking about the inefficiencies of loan servicing during his time at Tesla’s sales finance division. Despite originating loans for high-credit borrowers in California, Tesla still incurred significant costs in post-origination servicing. “We realized we could actually automate a lot of this using AI,” Malik said in a recent YC interview.
He partnered with Mukund Tibrewala, an engineer with prior experience at Dropbox and Airtable, to build an end-to-end automation platform for lenders. Their early prototype took shape in mid-2023, capitalizing on the release of scalable open-source language models like Meta’s LLaMA 2. That shift allowed the team to scale from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of calls per day, while maintaining the accuracy and compliance standards required in heavily regulated environments.
The initial breakthrough came after a cold email to Westlake Financial led to a pilot. The founders relocated to be near the lender’s office and spent over a year embedding with its team. The result: over $1 billion in processed transactions, 400,000 daily calls, and more than three million borrower interactions handled through the platform in its first 18 months.
Replacing Manual Processes with a Unified AI Stack
Salient offers three core tools: an AI agent platform to handle borrower communications across voice, text, email, and chat; an AI-powered compliance monitoring suite; and a servicing automation module that provides fraud detection, portfolio insights, and insurance workflows.
The company claims that lenders using Salient have cut handle times by 60%. Westlake Financial reports annual savings of $12 million and notes improved customer experiences from reducing friction in routine interactions. American Credit Acceptance and Exeter Finance are also customers, along with three publicly listed banks.
Salient has looked to avoid labor-intensive models with a productized approach, combining automation with compliance safeguards, including built-in protections for bankruptcy cases and TCPA violation detection. The platform says it supports multilingual interactions and monitors both AI and human agents for potential violations of unfair or abusive practices.
Malik positions the company as building a full-stack operating system for loan servicing: from onboarding to charge-off. That roadmap includes CRM tools, accounting features, and deeper workflow automation to reduce the unit cost of servicing and, over time, lower the cost of credit for borrowers.
Can a Software-First Strategy Outrun Outsourcing Giants?
Salient enters a competitive space where legacy BPOs like Cognizant and Infosys still command billions in servicing contracts. But their time-and-materials business models, paired with aging infrastructure, leave them exposed to AI-native alternatives.
Salient’s early traction further adds to evidence that vertical-specific platforms with regulatory fluency can carve out defensible ground. Financial services, particularly auto and consumer lending, present favorable conditions: high support volume, clear compliance thresholds, and measurable ROI.
The company reported a $14 million annualized run rate as of June 2025 with a team of just 10 engineers. Salient’s growth has been constrained more by internal bandwidth than market demand, according to Malik. With new capital, the company is hiring product and engineering talent to scale deployments and move beyond auto lending into mortgages and credit cards.
