I've spent my career at the intersection of software and lending. After early engineering roles at Oracle and Adobe and a Master's from Carnegie Mellon, I co-founded Cloud Lending Solutions in 2012, which grew into a global lending platform serving financial institutions worldwide before being acquired by Q2 (NYSE: QTWO) in 2018. Running Cloud Lending inside Q2 gave me a front-row view of how much manual, fragmented work still sits inside banks and credit unions — and when the AI wave arrived, it was clear this was the technology that could finally close that gap. That conviction became Uptiq: purpose-built AI for financial institutions, founded by a team that has lived inside FI operations for over a decade.

The currency in AI is trust, not capabilities. Regulated financial institutions don't just need AI that works — they need to feel safe about the AI apps running within their firewalls and workflows. That's the problem we solve. Every FI is heading toward an agentic transformation, and built one agent at a time, department by department, they end up with sprawl: ungrounded agents, duplicated effort, and nothing an examiner can audit. Uptiq is a trust partner — we bring that trust layer to FIs. Our agents are grounded in the institution's own products, policies, and rules, with bank-grade governance built in rather than bolted on. Today our commercial lending solutions are live at banks and credit unions, cutting weeks of manual work out of underwriting and financial spreading — value delivered inside a framework the institution can actually trust.

What stood out from the very first conversations was that Tau demonstrated a solid understanding of the operational challenges financial institutions face — this wasn't a fund pattern-matching on AI, but one that could back Uptiq's vision from a point of self-conviction. That depth has carried through the partnership: thoughtful questions, relevant introductions, and consistent support, including doubling down in our Series B. It never feels transactional; it feels like a partner in the build.