A Scottish tech company specialising in AI products for the financial services industry is set to double its headcount after securing £11 million in fresh funding.
Edinburgh-based Aveni has secured the financial injection from a consortium led by Puma Private Equity, with participation from Par Equity, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide Building Society. The latter two are working with the Scottish firm on development of its latest product, FinLLM.
Large language models or LLMs are used to recognise, translate, predict or generate text or other content. Aveni's FinLLM is being designed specifically for the needs of financial institutions.
“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," chief executive Joseph Twigg said. "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."
Founded in 2018, Aveni currently employs about 35 people and expects that number to double within the net 12 to 18 months. Following this latest investment the team will be moving to new facilities at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Aveni says the business has grown significantly during the past two years via sales of its existing compliance and productivity solutions, Aveni Detect and Aveni Assist. FinLLM will build on the success of these products, further establishing Aveni's presence across the financial services sector.
“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.
"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.”
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Existing investors Par Equity and Scottish Enterprise also took part in this latest funding round, bring to total raised to date by Aveni to £18m. Other previous investors include Tri Capital and Old College Capital.
Ben Leslie, investment director at Puma Private Equity, said Aveni's AI products are already having a significant impact on the financial services sector but there are still "huge" opportunities for growth going forward.
“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," he said.
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The money from Nationwide has come via its investment arm, NBS Ventures, which backs companies that "align with domains relevant to Nationwide now, or in the future". Samuel White, a partner at NBS Ventures, said his organisation has been "closely monitoring Aveni for some time".
"The investment will enable Nationwide to work closely with world-leading experts to responsibly and ethically utilise Generative AI to deliver better service and outcomes for our members," he said.
Mr Twigg added: “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.”
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