START: Charu Sharma & Michael Mernagh, Co-founders, Fenrock AI: “The First AI Workspace for Banking Back Office”

99% of U.S. banks aren't JPMorgan.
All of them are regulated like it.

The bottleneck isn't serving customers.
It's everything that happens after.

Loans.
Compliance.
Fraud investigations.
Customer operations.

The work keeps growing.
Headcount doesn't.

JPMorgan has tens of thousands of analysts.
A community bank has a handful.

That's the gap Fenrock AI is closing.

Fenrock is building the first AI workspace for the banking back office.

Built alongside U.S. bank CEOs.
Designed for banks.
One workspace for all of it.

AI gathers the information.
Organizes the evidence.
Drafts the analysis.
Prepares the report.

The analyst reviews.
The analyst decides.

No rip-and-replace.
No data migration.
 
Just an AI workspace embedded into existing workflows.

Every action is documented with bullet-proof audit logs.
Built-in regulatory guidance.
Reporting designed for examiners and boards.

An analyst clears about 10 alerts a day.
Fenrock is built for 20x that.

Not by replacing people.
By giving them capacity they've never had.

Banks process more.
Pass their exams.
Improve efficiency ratios.
And keep serving the communities that depend on them.

🎙️ Charu Sharma & Michael Mernagh, Co-Founders, Fenrock AI on Fondo START pod

01:16 — Fenrock AI's vision: AI agents for the banking back office

01:57 — Customer discovery leads from financial crime to banking compliance 

02:33 — Why small and midsize banks became the focus 

03:02 — Charu's early life and the experience that shaped her resilience 

03:52 — Building multiple startups before founding Fenrock 

04:18 — Michael's background building privacy-preserving machine learning at Apple 

05:07 — Finding the right co-founder and choosing a long-term mission 

06:03 — Pivoting the company and using YC to accelerate execution 

07:37 — How YC raised the team's ambition and execution speed 

08:36 — Building the first AI workspace for the banking back office 

09:17 — Helping small banks meet regulatory expectations with AI 

10:24 — Human-in-the-loop workflows, audit trails, and early customer impact

Check out fenrock.ai