Maximum emerges from stealth with $30 million to build AI banking OS. By PYMNTS | August 5, 2026 Maximum emerged from stealth Monday (Aug. 3) and said it raised $30 million in a seed round to build an artificial intelligence (AI)-native operating system for banks. Maximum Founder Randy Fernando previously founded the FinTech companies Vault and Power and sold Vault to Acorns in 2017 and Power to Marqeta in 2023, the company said in a Monday press release. At the time of the acquisitions, PYMNTS described Vault as a developer of retirement fund investment services, and Power as a card management platform. Operators who helped build Fernando's previous companies make up the team at Maximum, and investors who funded those earlier ventures are backing the new company, according to the release. "The advancement of AI is creating a paradigm shift in financial services, and banks can't keep pace by relying on legacy providers," Fernando said in the release. "Maximum will provide banks with ultimate control, powerful agentic capabilities and the tools to innovate, enabling them to deliver exceptional new experiences to their customers and partners." Maximum has developed a platform that is powered by AI at a foundational level, which enables banks to build and deploy custom agents, gain real-time visibility into customer activity, deliver innovative financial products and better manage risk at a time when AI is exposing new vulnerabilities to the banking industry, according to the release. Maximum plans to work with banks of all sizes, the release said. With the new funding, Maximum will accelerate product development, expand its engineering and operations teams, and support bank implementations with its existing customers, per the release. Maximum's seed round was led by CRV. Caitlin Bolnick Rellas, general partner at CRV, said in the release that banking technology has reached a point at which incremental improvements are no longer enough. "Randy has repeatedly identified foundational shifts before the broader market, and we're excited to back him for a second time as Maximum builds what we believe will become the operating system for the next generation of banking," Bolnick Rellas said. The PYMNTS Intelligence report "Financial Services Pull Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race" found that financial services firms are "going all in on AI" and have deeply embedded the technology into tasks such as revenue recognition, credit scoring and sales forecasting.

Maximum raises $30M in Seed funding. August 4, 2026 Maximum, a Miami, FL-based provider of an AI-native operating system for banks, raised $30M in Seed funding. The round was led by CRV with participation from Pear VC, Restive, Plug and Play Ventures, Anthemis, and others. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate product development, expand its engineering and operations teams, and support bank implementations. Led by CEO Randy Fernando, Maximum is building an AI-native operating system designed to replace fragmented, legacy core banking infrastructure. Their platform operates in real time with AI integrated at a foundational level, allowing banks to build and deploy custom agents to automate complex operational workflows, gain real-time visibility into customer activity, deliver innovative financial products, and protect against emerging security vulnerabilities with enhanced security protocols. Don't just read the news. Own the data. Stop manually tracking deals. Access this round and over 100 others this week - in our structured Master Database (XML) + Weekly Intelligence PDF. [Access FinSMEs Intelligence Hub] 04/08/2026

Maximum lands $30M on the thesis that banks need more than an AI upgrade. Inside many American banks, employees still spend four or five hours a day making sure one system agrees with another. The work is repetitive and invisible to customers, yet it persists beneath an industry promising instant payments and increasingly intelligent financial tools. "These are things that should be automated," Miami fintech entrepreneur Randy Fernando told Forbes. Fernando is betting $30 million that banks are ready to act. His new Miami-based company, Maximum, emerged from stealth with one of fintech's largest seed rounds and an ambitious mission: replace the fragmented infrastructure at the heart of banking with a real-time, AI-native operating system. CRV led the financing, joined by Pear VC, Restive Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Anthemis Group and other investors. They were backing a founder with a history of building and selling fintech companies. Fernando founded Vault Investing and sold it to Acorns in 2017. He later launched Power Finance, which Marqeta acquired in 2023 for $275 million in cash. That track record helped make for an unusually fast raise. Fernando told Forbes that CRV returned with a term sheet "within twenty four hours," while the entire round closed within days. Building Maximum will take considerably longer. The company is targeting the core systems responsible for recording a bank's balances, payments, transactions and ledger entries. More than 70% of nearly 5,000 U.S. banks still use core technology created in the last century, according to Maximum's press release. Those systems predate mobile banking, real-time payments and artificial intelligence. "Banking software has kind of had one job. It's to remember," Fernando [pictured above] told Forbes. "Remember every transaction, every balance, every payment, every ledger entry, and it's been great at that." Maximum argues that remembering is no longer enough. Its platform is being designed to interpret activity, anticipate what might happen next and automate operational work. Banks would be able to build agents that handle complex workflows, monitor customer activity and help create new financial products. Stay ahead of Miami tech. Join 16,000+ founders, investors, and tech professionals. The opportunity is particularly pronounced among community and regional banks, which often depend on a few dominant core providers while connecting dozens of additional services. Fernando told Forbes that one bank he examined worked with "over 100 additional vendors." "The issue has been the concentration," he said. "You've only got two or three providers that primarily power these institutions." That concentration also underscores the difficulty of Maximum's mission. Core migrations can take years, require dedicated internal teams and introduce serious operational risk. Maximum does not plan to offer a limited "sidecar core" that runs beside an incumbent platform. It is looking for banks prepared to make a full transition. "We're starting with bank number one, and we're doing a full migration end to end and then we move on to bank number two," Fernando asserted. He did not minimize the challenge. "I believe banking will be one of the hardest industries to rebuild around that idea," he wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing Maximum and the round. Maximum will use the funding for product development, hiring and bank implementations. Although the company said it had attracted interest from larger community and regional banks, it has not publicly named a customer or demonstrated its platform operating inside an institution. Maximum therefore enters the market well funded and deeply experienced, but still unproven. Its financing came together in days; its credibility will be earned through slow, painstaking bank conversions. "We're still early. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead," Fernando wrote. "But I can't think of a more important problem to spend the next decade solving." READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI: