MidLyr, an AI infrastructure startup founded by Egyptian-born Wael Elsahhar and Ruochen Ren, has secured 2.5 million dollars in pre-seed funding. The company targets the operational core of banks and fintechs, where compliance, risk, and process management remain heavy, manual, and error prone. Its proposition is to translate policy text into compliant, data-connected workflows that automate complex tasks without breaching regulatory boundaries.
Funding Round Overview
The round was led by Silicon Badia, with participation from Wedbush Ventures, Hustle Fund, DCG, and Story Ventures. Capital will be directed to product acceleration, deeper partnerships with banks and fintechs, and recruiting across engineering, data science, design, and compliance product roles. The company is building teams in the United States and the Middle East to leverage regional technical talent as a long-term edge.
Problem and Market Context
Financial institutions run on millions of policy rules and procedures that touch billions of dollars and large customer bases. Despite that scale, many operations still rely on rigid workflows and manual controls that are slow to adapt and hard to audit. The result is high operating expense, fragmented tooling, and persistent compliance risk that distracts teams from customer service and growth.
Technology and Approach
MidLyr aligns AI agents directly with regulations, internal policies, and operational data to create what it describes as bank-grade automation. Banks continue to define policies in text, connect their internal systems, and then safely automate processes such as issue resolution, risk reviews, and marketing compliance. The promise is an adaptive, durable foundation that preserves oversight while removing repetitive work and reducing institutional risk.
Investor Perspective
Silicon Badia’s investment case centers on technical depth paired with an operator’s grasp of financial workflows. The firm argues that real value in bank automation comes from systems architected around policy fidelity, auditability, and production reliability, not generic AI overlays. Backers say MidLyr’s design reflects these priorities, which they believe will help institutions adopt automation without sacrificing control.
Team and Track Record
Elsahhar and Ren previously built core banking infrastructure at Imprint, experience that exposed them to the demands of regulated systems at scale. Elsahhar’s background includes leadership roles at Imprint and Amazon Pay, along with strategy and operations work advising banks and regulators. Ren led platform engineering at Imprint and has prior experience in operations scaling at Grab and core shopping systems at Amazon.
Product Differentiation
MidLyr’s framing is less about adding AI to existing tools and more about re-architecting how operations run within compliance constraints. By centering workflows on machine-readable policies and live institutional data, the platform aims to keep automation provably within defined boundaries. That focus seeks to address a long-standing gap where generic tools either fall short on nuance or introduce unmanageable risk.
Early Use Cases
Initial targets include issue resolution queues, structured risk and controls assessments, and marketing asset reviews that must meet regulatory standards. These domains share a common need for traceability, rule adherence, and rapid change management when policies evolve. MidLyr proposes to deliver measurable reductions in cycle time and error rates while preserving complete audit trails.
Hiring and Geographic Footprint
The company is recruiting across technical and product disciplines to support implementation with design-partner banks and fintechs. Building in the United States provides proximity to major financial institutions, while the Middle East offers deep engineering and data science talent pools. Management views this dual presence as a way to balance customer access with cost-effective, specialized hiring.
Competitive Landscape
Banks have experimented with workflow suites, RPA, and custom scripts, but many efforts stall at compliance scale. MidLyr’s bet is that policy-first, data-connected agents will outperform point solutions that cannot adapt or prove adherence. If successful, that approach could shift budgets from maintenance to automation outcomes, a meaningful change in a sector where operations consume the majority of revenue.
Near-Term Roadmap
Funding will underwrite product hardening, integrations, and controls that meet bank production standards. The company also plans to formalize partnerships that codify policy libraries and shared templates for common processes. These steps are designed to reduce time to value and make adoption repeatable across institutions.
MidLyr’s raise signals investor confidence in compliance-aligned automation as a next phase of bank operations. The founders’ regulated-systems pedigree, a policy-first architecture, and a cross-Atlantic hiring plan give the company a clear thesis. Execution now hinges on proving reliability and trust at scale, the threshold that determines whether banks move from pilots to platform commitments.