Tyler Maran and Anna Pojawis, the founders of a startup, initially gained traction with paying clients and secured $3.2 million in seed funding for their venture, OmniAI, which focused on leveraging AI for business data analysis. However, they soon faced a pivotal moment, realizing that their vision for the company was not expansive enough.
About a year ago, the duo began to reconsider the potential growth of OmniAI. Maran shared with Business Insider that this led to a challenging insight: "We really didn't see where the full $10 billion, $100 billion vision was here."
Having graduated from the renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator, Maran and Pojawis ultimately decided to discontinue OmniAI and have spent the last ten months developing a new venture, Monumint, which specializes in banking AI agents—despite the financial setbacks from ceasing their earlier project.
Toward the end of last year, after acquiring initial customers for Monumint, the founders presented a pitch deck to their current investors to ensure everyone was on board with the company’s new path and to facilitate future fundraising efforts.
The feedback was "overwhelmingly positive," according to Maran. He noted that several investors, with backgrounds in financial services, provided valuable introductions, including a lead that could potentially become one of Monumint's largest clients.
Monumint represents a return to their origins for both founders. Before transitioning to software engineering and becoming entrepreneurs, Pojawis and Maran worked as commercial bankers at CIBC, one of Canada’s largest banks, where they first met during an analyst training program almost ten years ago.
Both had aspirations to start their own businesses, Maran explained, and later reconnected after individually joining different startups backed by Y Combinator. With the rise of generative AI, they decided to team up and launched their company through YC under the name Omni in 2024.
The new startup, Monumint, creates conversational AI agents specifically designed for banks, credit unions, and lenders. These agents are capable of answering inquiries, gathering necessary information, and managing complex processes such as coordinating loan applications from multiple business entities and updating beneficiary details, according to Maran.
Currently, Monumint serves 20 paying clients, which include small-business lenders like Lendio and ByzFunder, as well as several FDIC-insured banks such as Community Bank, as highlighted by Maran.
With a small team of six employees, the company aims to utilize its funding to expand both engineering and sales personnel.
The pitch deck Monumint shared with investors, including FundersClub, Y Combinator, and Imagination Capital, has been summarized for public sharing, with certain slides redacted for confidentiality.
