Scottish AI fintech Aveni raises £11 million in Series A joined by Nationwide and Lloyds

Aveni, a Scottish AI fintech recently held a Series A funding round which managed to raise £11 million. The company attracted a lot of attention, especially after the round was joined by Nationwide and Lloyds Banking Group.

While the two are both major banks in the UK, the round was actually led by Puma Private Equity, with additional participation from Par Equity.

Aveni has a role to play in the future of the financial services sector

Aveni is a company that creates AI products that are specifically designed to streamline workflows in the financial services industry. They can also help with analyzing documents, and meeting across an entire range of operational functions, and they have a strong focus on consumer duty compliance and financial advisory services.

The reason why Lloyds and Nationwide were quick to join is the fact that their cash injection will help fund the development of a new product. Known as FinLLM, the product is a large language model that was built specifically for the financial sector in collaboration with the two banks.

Aveni’s CEO, Joseph Twigg, stated that the financial services industry doesn’t need AI models that can quote Shakespeare. Instead, it needs models that can deliver transparency, trust, and correctness above all else.

Twigg further explained that the way to achieve this is to develop small, highly-tuned language models that would be trained on financial services data. Then, they need to be carefully reviewed by financial services experts, who would be able to identify specific use cases for the sector.

FinLLM can outperform generic language models

This is where FinLLM comes in, as the objective of the model is to set a new standard for the controlled, responsible, and ethical adoption of GenAI, according to Twigg. He added that the product will be able to outperform generic models across the selected financial service use cases.

https://x.com/ShaulDavidUK/status/1817910665379492190

Lloyds Banking Group’s head of fintech investments, Robin Scher, also commented on the model, saying that its development represents a huge opportunity for the financial services industry. It will become a game changer by streamlining operations and improving customer experience.

He added: “We are keen to support Aveni’s growth as we invest in their vision to develop the FinLLM alongside partners. Our collaboration aims to establish Aveni as a frontrunner of the industry’s adoption of AI, whilst maintaining a focus on responsible usage and customer-centricity.”