£12m investment accelerates launch of Agent Assure, closing the AI agent safety gap
Edinburgh, 04 June 2026: Aveni, the UK’s leading AI fintech specialist in wealth management, financial advice and banking, today announced a £12 million funding round led by PXN Ventures, the UK’s fastest-growing venture and investments firm outside London and the South East, and supported by existing investors Puma Growth Partners, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Scottish Enterprise. The investment will accelerate development of Aveni’s Unified Assurance Platform (UAP) and the launch of its new Agent Assure and Agent Approve solutions, purpose-built to assess the conduct risk of AI agents that interact with consumers in financial services.
Aveni is the established market leader in AI adoption across UK wealth and banking, with over seven years of live deployments and product development. Its products Aveni Assist, an AI productivity solution for advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, its AI compliance monitoring tool, are deployed across the UK’s leading banks, wealth managers and financial advisers. Underpinning both is FinLLM, Aveni’s proprietary suite of specialist small language models built for and utilising UK financial services data.
Agentic AI adoption in financial services is accelerating, but deployment at scale is being held back by a critical gap in assurance. With just 2% of firms reporting adequate AI guardrails, the absence of robust, regulated oversight for AI agents that interact directly with consumers is the number one challenge for the industry. Regulators are clear that the mode of engagement — human or machine — is secondary to consumer outcomes, which must be assessed consistently across all interactions.
Agent Assure directly addresses this gap. A natural extension of the Aveni Detect proposition, it enables firms to monitor and manage the conduct risk of AI agents alongside human interactions, in a single unified view. Together with Aveni Assist, Aveni Detect and the new Agent Approve solution, it forms the Unified Assurance Platform: the financial service industry’s first comprehensive framework for assuring both human and agent interactions with consumers at scale.
Aveni is a participant in the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox programme and has established the Agent Assurance Expert Council to support development of responsible AI governance frameworks. The company is working directly with regulators and industry bodies to shape the emerging standards for AI in financial services.
Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, said: “The continued confidence shown by our existing investors is a powerful endorsement of the direction we’re taking. We have spent seven years building the models, the experience and the regulatory relationships that make us uniquely qualified to solve the hardest problem in AI adoption right now: how do you assure the conduct of an AI agent interacting with a real consumer? Agent Assure is our answer — and this investment accelerates our ability to deliver our full platform at scale.”
Alastair Moore at PXN Ventures, said: “Aveni is fast becoming financial advisers’ go-to tool for helping them leverage AI in a safe and appropriate way. The team now has seven years of live deployments and proprietary models built within the UK financial services sector. Its infrastructure is answering one of the biggest questions in AI adoption: how to manage real client interactions and build trust, so advisers can focus on what they do best. We’re proud to support Aveni through multiple PXN funds, including the Praetura Growth VCT, as it continues its growth journey and demonstrates the world-class fintech capabilities of the North of the UK.”
Ben Leslie, Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners, commented: “The impact Aveni is making in deploying AI into UK financial services is already significant, and we continue to see a substantial growth opportunity ahead. With agentic AI adoption accelerating and regulators rightly focused on consistent consumer outcomes, robust assurance for AI agents is rapidly becoming a core requirement for the sector. As a standout example of Scotland’s growing strength as a technology hub, Aveni is well placed to lead this next phase. We are delighted to invest again from our Scotland office to support Joseph, Jamie, Professor Lexi Birch and the wider team as they scale the Unified Assurance Platform and launch Agent Assure.”
Kirsty Rutter, Fintech Investment Director at Lloyds Banking Group, said: “Agentic AI represents a significant opportunity for financial services to enhance customer experience through more personalised interactions. Aveni is helping firms adopt this technology in a safe and responsible way. We’re pleased to continue supporting Aveni’s ongoing development through investment and partnership.”
The continued backing of existing investors reflects confidence in Aveni’s roadmap and market position. PXN Ventures led the round alongside Puma Growth Partners, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Scottish Enterprise.
ENDS
For more information please contact Kate Forster, Head of PR and Communications for Aveni – kate.forster@aveni.ai or +44 7787 534999.
Notes to Editors
About Aveni
Aveni is the AI platform purpose-built for regulated financial services. Its Act • Administer • Assure operating model enables firms to deploy AI guidance agents for customers, copilots for teams, and unified assurance. Its products Aveni Assist, an AI productivity solution for advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, its AI compliance monitoring tool, are already deployed across the UK’s leading banks, wealth managers and financial advisers. All powered by Aveni’s proprietary suite of financial services AI models, including FinLLM, the UK’s first large language model built specifically for financial services, alongside the Aveni Compliance Knowledge Hub, a machine-readable regulatory intelligence layer built from millions of real interactions.
Active across some of the UK’s largest financial institutions, Aveni creates sovereign, compounding IP rather than commodity infrastructure. Founded in 2018, Aveni originated as a University of Edinburgh start up venture. Lexi Birch, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Aveni is a Professor in Natural Language Processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
About PXN Ventures
PXN Ventures is the venture capital arm of PXN Group, formed as a result of two of the North’s best fund managers (Praetura Ventures and Par Equity) coming together to create an investor that the region deserves. With offices in Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds and London, we deliver world-class investment programmes at scale to help build the Northern economy, supporting founders across a diverse range of sectors, including deep tech, life sciences and software.
PXN Ventures is committed to backing early-stage founders across the North of the UK, with a long and growing list of northern success stories in our portfolio that have received early backing from PXN, including Modern Milkman, Phlo, AccessPay, Street Group and Advanced Electric Machines. As well as its EIS, VCT and institutional funds, including the GMC Life Sciences Fund II, PXN Ventures is the North West fund manager for the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, which is managed on behalf of the British Business Bank.
About Puma Growth Partners
Puma Growth Partners is a leading provider of growth capital to scale-up companies across all sectors and regions of the UK, delivering investments between £5 million to £15 million. Puma Growth Partners takes a highly active approach to value creation, partnering with management teams to help drive up equity value through expansion and professionalisation. Further information on Puma Growth Partners can be found at www.pumagp.co.uk.
About Lloyds Banking Group
With 28 million customers, of which over 23 million are digitally active, we’re proud to be the UK’s biggest digital bank. Our services span retail and commercial banking, insurance and long-term savings, delivered through trusted brands including Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows. Our purpose is Helping Britain Prosper. For more than 320 years, we’ve served households and businesses across the UK. Today, we’re transforming how we do that. We’ve invested more than £4bn in our digital transformation, and we’re just getting started. That means building smarter, more resilient tech, expanding our use of AI, and creating seamless experiences for a digital-first Britain.
About Nationwide
Nationwide is the world’s largest building society, with over 16 million members. Following its acquisition of Virgin Money UK PLC, Nationwide is connected with one in three people in the UK and is the second largest provider of mortgages and retail deposits. It is also a major provider of current accounts, credit cards, personal loans and business banking. Customers can choose to manage their finances in a branch, via mobile app, the internet, telephone, and post. Nationwide has around 25,000 employees and its head office is in Swindon, UK.
As a financial services provider owned by its members, not shareholders, Nationwide’s purpose is: Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society. For more information see About Us | Nationwide.
About Scottish Enterprise
Scottish Enterprise (SE) is Scotland’s national economic development agency and a non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government. It supports businesses to innovate and scale to transform the Scottish economy by focusing on new market opportunities through targeted investment, innovation and internationalisation. Follow us on LinkedIn.
