Puma Private Equity, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide invest in Aveni to deliver market-leading generative AI solutions for the UK financial services industry
Edinburgh, UK – 29 July 2024 – AI Fintech Aveni.ai has announced one of the largest Series A investments in a Scottish business this year, amounting to £11 million. The investment is led by Puma Private Equity with participation from financial services industry leaders: Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide.
Aveni combines globally-recognised AI expertise with extensive financial services experience, to create large language models (LLMs) and AI products designed specifically for the financial services industry (‘vertically aligned’). Aveni is trusted by some of the UK’s leading financial services firms, seeing significant business growth over the past two years, through existing compliance and productivity solutions Aveni Detect & Aveni Assist. This investment will enable Aveni to build on the success of existing products, further establishing its presence across the financial services sector and introducing revolutionary technology capability through the creation of FinLLM, a financial services specific large language model.
FinLLM is being developed in partnership with new investors Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide. FinLLM is an industry-aligned Large Language Model, aiming to set the standard for the transparent, responsible and ethical adoption of Generative AI across UK financial services. The funding will further establish Aveni’s market leading position in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for UK financial services businesses, to drive the adoption of generative AI across the sector.
Post investment the team developing FinLLM will be based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, in a state-of-the-art facility.
The funding round was led by Puma Private Equity with participation from Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide. Existing investors ParEquity and Scottish Enterprise also participated in the round.
Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, explains: “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. 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.
