As AI begins to transform the financial services industry — from investment banking to wealth management to the CFO’s back-office toolkit — AI native startups and legacy players alike are scrambling for position.
VCs are backing startups that use AI to help bankers better source deals, assist finance workers in their daily tasks, and handle fraud and compliance in the heavily regulated industry.
Established players like Monzo in the banking space and Digits for accounting, both founded years before ChatGPT burst onto the scene, have been integrating AI features into their products to better match the moment.
This is our second market map ahead of the Machine Earning AI Summit, which takes place on September 29 in San Francisco.
The summit will explore agentic commerce, intelligent money, enterprise finance operations, the evolving consumer experience, and the major meta-themes including fraud, risk, compliance, and security.
For this list, we’re focused specifically on AI tools for financial services firms, including lending, accounting, compliance and fraud, wealth management, and banking. Previously, we covered AI shopping, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure behind AI-orchestrated payments.
Fintech and financial services companies have seen a lot of ups and downs in recent years. The bull run in 2021 and subsequent bust in 2022 and 2023 hit fintech startups hard, especially those where lending was central. High interest rates continue to be an obstacle.
But since the generative AI boom took off, investors are betting agents will soon automate a lot of work: lending proposals, portfolio management and trading, fraud detection and prevention, loan approvals, and compliance.
The hot startups have different primary customers, Slow Ventures partner Yoni Rechtman told us: those that sell AI-native products to existing financial services firms, or those that are selling tools that do the work of those firms with AI.
“If we look historically, large financial services, banks, insurance companies, etc. are some of the biggest software customers,” said Rechtman. “They’re huge businesses that deal with highly complex workflows and structured data, so it’s not unreasonable that they are also going to be huge AI customers.”
Alternatively, a lot of fast-growing AI startups have been looking to partner with companies that are building AI tools to handle accounting, tax and audits, compliance, and assist the work of a CFO rather than sell to those firms, so the market has taken off for these kinds of companies too.
We’ve previously covered the rise of the AI roll-up, where VC investors incubate an AI-services startup and acquire multiple firms in a sector such as accounting. We’re not including these in our market map.
For this list, we focused on seven categories of fintech tools, broken down into the buckets below.
Many startups have popped up to help investment bankers research stocks and draft memos around deals. One buzzy company in this space, Rogo, raised quick up rounds between January and April this year from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
AI tools that automate wealth management have seen rapid growth in tandem with the AI boom, since there are now many younger AI millionaires who have not yet amassed enough capital to require a family office, but still would like assistance handling their money.
Tools for helping CFOs and the finance offices within companies have been a popular sector over the last couple of years. Rillet, for example, is an ERP-focused startup that came out of stealth two years ago, and it’s grown incredibly quickly: founder Nicolas Kopp told TechCrunch that he raised his $100 million Series C in less than 2 days this year off his strong growth numbers.
Companies in this space are often targeting specific parts of the CFO’s needs, like accounts payable, company financial planning, and monthly or quarterly close management.
Fraud prevention was one of the first places financial firms put AI to work, automating the detection process. Compliance is a sector where you see the services split — some companies like Unit21 sell software to company compliance teams, while others are offering to do the compliance work themselves.
Compliance has its own special risks, as highlighted in the recent case of Delve, which isn’t in the financial sector but rather automates security compliance. The company was accused of fraudulent SOC-2 approvals by a whistleblower in March this year, after raising $32 million in Series A funding at a $300 million valuation. The company put out a statement denying the bulk of the whistleblower’s claims.
Private fund administration tools have drawn less attention than CFO tools over the past two years, but lately have been heating up. Multiple investors mentioned Hanover Park as an upstart AI-native fund admin platform to watch, competing with private incumbent Carta.
Hanover Park raised a $27 million Series A round from Emergence, Lux Capital, and Susa Ventures in March, and took on Conviction as a customer, the company announced last week.
Another name that came up was Formulary Financial, which raised seed funding from Khosla in January.
Accounting and tax startups have a clear split between those selling to incumbents and those competing, like Rechtman described. Basis, which raised $100 million in February from Accel and Google Ventures, sells agents to accounting firms — “built specifically for accountants.” So does DataSnipper, which crossed a $1 billion valuation in 2024 selling audit automation to those same firms.
Pilot and Fondo sit on the other side of the line, selling to the startups that would otherwise hire an accountant. Pilot is now hedging as it expands, though; its second product, Meridian, is pitched as an operating system for accounting firms.
The incumbents are mostly buying rather than building. Thomson Reuters acquired Materia, an AI assistant for tax and audit work, in 2024. Bloomberg agreed in July to buy Canoe Intelligence, which automates the document processing behind private fund reporting.
Lending startups had it the worst in the 2022-2023 downturn, and venture investors are now favoring companies that sell software to lenders rather than making loans.
One startup that fits this bill, Taktile, raised $110 million in June from Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Tiger Global for a platform banks use to make underwriting and onboarding decisions.
The companies that are direct lenders are fewer and more specialized. Split Pay, formerly Rent.app, fronts rent and mortgage payments and collects in two installments; it announced $125 million across its Series A and Series B rounds led by Khosla last week. Another such company, PayZen, focuses on underwriting healthcare patient bills.
Business banking providers are using AI to help streamline a customer’s financial data into displays that offer more insight. Mercury uses AI tools to automatically read bills, set up autopay, reconcile receipts, and generate invoices.
Existing European charter banks and players for consumer cards, like Revolut and Monzo Bank, have chosen to mostly adopt AI tooling on the backend. Where they have launched consumer features, like Revolut’s in-app assistant, they emphasize them in their pitches as tools that make the apps easier to use. Consumers care more about a service being faster, cheaper, and easier to use, said Moxxie Ventures general partner Alex Roetter, and so AI is less of a selling point than it would be for a business-facing customer.
Fintech, of course, carries extra security risks, as Revolut painfully learned recently. Dependence on startup middlemen can also cause problems — the 2024 collapse of Synapse froze customer access to funds at several smaller fintechs for months, and the CFPB had to tap its civil penalty fund to reimburse $46 million to account holders.
Other startups like Lead Bank and Erebor are actual US charter banks with specialized suites of fintech products. Lead Bank’s customers are other fintechs building products on its charter, while Erebor banks tech and crypto companies directly under its own name. Last week, Mercury received conditional approval from the FDIC to open a charter bank of its own as soon as next year.
We compiled a list of 89 startups — some early-stage, others with more traction — that are building AI-powered tools for the financial sector. We based this on our own research and conversations with fintech and AI-focused VCs.
