With a wealth of financial services experience and world-leading natural language processing (NLP) expertise, University of Edinburgh startup Aveni is creating cutting-edge AI solutions that are built specifically for the financial services industry.
Award-winning fintech company Aveni is spearheading the financial services (FS) productivity revolution by fusing advanced AI with human ingenuity. The startup company’s solutions are accelerating FS workflows by providing automated admin support and quality assurance, analysing customer interactions, and providing actionable insights.
Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service, has supported Aveni from the very start, helping founders Joseph Twigg (Executive MBA graduate) and Professor Lexi Birch (Personal Chair of Multilingual Natural Language Processing, School of Informatics) to develop the initial idea and providing support and expertise throughout the company formation process.
Old College Capital (OCC), the University’s in-house investment fund, invested in the company’s first pre-seed round in 2020 and twice more as the company piloted its early software with major banks and wealth managers. OCC has been actively involved with the company’s development throughout, including at the board level and via regular catchups with the investor group and founders.
In 2024, the company announced a £11m Series A fundraising round led by Puma Private Equity, which they are using to drive business growth and support the development of FinLLM, a UK finance-specific Large Language Model. Based at Edinburgh Futures Institute, the FinLLM team is led by Dr Birch and aims to set the standard for transparent, responsible and ethical adoption of Generative AI across UK financial services. The team is developing FinLLM to support real-time guardrails that can take proportionate action, inserting required disclosures, steering conversations to safer flows, or blocking high-risk outputs. This will ensure issues are prevented, not just observed.
Aveni is committed to enabling greater efficiencies and accuracy for firms to better manage the advice journey, increase oversight of risk analysis, data collection and quality assurance processes.
In February 2026 Aveni completed a pilot of its Agent Assure solution in the Financial Conduct Authority’s inaugural Supercharged Sandbox. They demonstrated how end-to-end assurance (spanning pre-deployment stress testing and post-production monitoring) can unlock safe deployment of agentic AI in regulated environments.
In March 2026 Aveni launch a collaborative forum called the Agent Assurance Expert Council (AAEC), bringing together senior leaders from across financial services, risk and compliance to tackle one of the most pressing challenges facing the industry: how to assure and govern the next generation of AI-driven agents
And in June 2026, the company announced a £12m fund raise led by PXN Ventures and supported by existing investors Puma Growth Partners, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Scottish Enterprise, to accelerate development of its Unified Assurance Platform (UAP) and the launch of its new Agent Assure and Agent Approve solutions.
Today Aveni comprises a team of over 50 scientists and engineers who continue to collaborate with the sector and develop industry-leading AI innovations to transform financial workflow productivity and compliance. Already trusted by some of the biggest brands in the industry, including Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide, Aveni is powering the next generation of financial services.
Joseph Twigg Aveni CEO said:
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.”
