University of Edinburgh startup Aveni, a leading AI specialist in wealth management, financial advice and banking, today announced £12 million raised in its latest funding round.
The round was led by PXN Ventures 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.
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.
Underpinning Aveni’s products is FinLLM, a proprietary suite of specialist small language models built for and utilising UK financial services data.
Aveni’s Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Professor Lexi Birch, is Personal Chair of Multilingual Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics and a Fellow of the University's Generative AI Lab.
Aveni was supported to start up in 2018 by Edinburgh Innovations and received early seed funding from Old College Capital (OCC), the University’s venture investment fund, which continues to work closely with the founders. Its Series A raise of £11m in 2024 was one of the largest in Scottish business that year. Aveni is based in the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Katharine Fox, Head of Investment at OCC, said:
Aveni is helping financial services to unlock the potential of AI in a practical and meaningful way. Their focus on trust and assurance sets a benchmark for responsible AI use. As an early investor, we have been proud to support the team on their journey as they have built strong momentum across the market. We look forward to continuing to support the team as they grow. ”
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. ”
