Aveni has raised £11 million in Series A investment to drive the adoption of artificial intelligence into financial services.
The funding round was led by Puma Private Equity with participation from Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and existing investors Par Equity and Scottish Enterprise.
It will enable Edinburgh-based Aveni to build on the success of existing compliance and productivity solutions Aveni Detect & Aveni Assist. It is creating FinLLM, a financial services-specific large language model, in partnership with Lloyds and Nationwide.
FinLLM aims to set the standard for the transparent, responsible and ethical adoption of generative AI across UK financial services. The team behind it will be based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute in a state-of-the-art facility.
“The financial services industry does not need AI models that can quote Shakespeare – it needs AI models that deliver transparency, trust and above all correctness,” said Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni.
“The way to achieve this is to develop small, highly tuned language models, trained on financial services data, reviewed by financial services experts for specific financial services use cases.
“Generative AI represents the most significant technological evolution of our generation and we’re in the nascent stages of adoption. This presents a significant opportunity for Aveni and our partners.
“The objective with FinLLM is to set a new standard for the controlled, responsible and ethical adoption of Generative AI, outperforming all other generic models across our selected financial service use cases.”
Ben Leslie, investment director, Puma Private Equity, commented: “The impact that Aveni has made in delivering AI solutions to the financial services sector is already significant and there is huge opportunity for growth going forwards.
“With Scotland’s position as a prominent tech hub on the rise and with the increased regulatory burden on financial services businesses, we believe that Aveni is in a unique position to solve key challenges faced by the sector.”
Robin Scher, head of FinTech investments, Lloyds Banking Group, said: “Aveni’s cutting-edge AI solutions offer a huge opportunity for the financial services industry, streamlining operations and elevating the customer experience.
“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.”