Scottish generative AI fintech Aveni has secured an £11m funding round featuring investments from Lloyds Bank and Nationwide.
Founded in 2018, Aveni develops large language models (LLMs) for the financial services industry.
Among the company’s products is a natural language processing system to analyse customer conversations and automate processes for regulated professional services.
The investments from Lloyds Bank and Nationwide are part of a partnership with Aveni to develop FinLLM. The startup said it will “set the standard for the transparent, responsible and ethical adoption of generative AI” in finance.
“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.”
The funding round was led by Puma Private Equity and featured further participation from Scottish Enterprise and Par Equity.
“Aveni’s cutting-edge AI solutions offer a huge opportunity for the financial services industry, streamlining operations and elevating the customer experience,” said Robin Scher, head of fintech investments at Lloyds Banking Group.
Samuel White, venture partner at NBS Ventures added that the investment from Nationwide would allow it to “work closely” to deliver “ethical” generative AI solutions in finance.
Aveni previously raised £2.75m in June 2022.