Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide have joined an £11 million Series A funding round in Scottish AI fintech Aveni.
The investment is led by Puma Private Equity with additional participation from Par Equity.
Aveni creates AI products designed specifically to streamline workflows in the financial services industry, analysing documents and meetings across a range of operational functions with a strong focus on financial advisory services and consumer duty compliance.
The cash injection will help fund the development of a new product, FinLLM, a large language model built specifically for the financial sector in collaboration with Lloyds and Nationwide.
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.
"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.”
Robin Scher, head of fintech investments, Lloyds Banking Group says the development programme offers a "huge opportunity" for the financial services industry by 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,” he says.