Aveni has secured a Series A investment of £11m, marking it as one of the most substantial early-stage funding rounds for a Scottish firm in 2024.
The round was led by Puma Private Equity and saw participation from Par Equity, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, and other leaders in the financial services industry.
The investment underlines a growing confidence in Aveni’s unique approach, which merges its globally recognised AI expertise with deep financial services experience to develop specialised large language models (LLMs) and AI products. These innovations are specifically tailored for the financial services sector.
This fresh infusion of capital will enable Aveni to enhance its existing product suite, Aveni Detect and Aveni Assist, which have already seen significant adoption among the UK’s top financial firms. The funding will also support the development of FinLLM, an industry-aligned large language model that promises to redefine the application of generative AI within UK financial services, focusing on transparency, trust, and precision.
FinLLM is set to be a benchmark project for the ethical and responsible integration of AI in financial services, co-developed with new investors such as Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide. The initiative will be led by a dedicated team at the state-of-the-art Edinburgh Futures Institute.
The round also features continued support from existing stakeholders including Scottish Enterprise, highlighting sustained investor confidence in Aveni’s vision and strategic direction.
Aveni CEO Joseph Twigg commented on the investment’s significance: “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.”
Moreover, the company has previously attracted attention and funding, which laid the groundwork for this latest financing round. This earlier support has been pivotal in Aveni’s journey towards becoming a leader in AI-driven solutions tailored for the financial services sector.
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