AI fintech Aveni.ai has announced one of the largest Series A investments in a Scottish business this year, amounting to £11 million.

The investment is led by Puma Private Equity with participation from Par Equity and financial services industry leaders: Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide.

Aveni combines AI expertise with financial services experience, to create large language models (LLMs) and AI products designed specifically for the financial services industry (‘vertically aligned’).

This investment will, according to Aveni, enable the company to ‘build on the success of existing products, further establishing its presence across the financial services sector and introducing revolutionary technology through the creation of FinLLM, a financial services specific large language model.’

FinLLM is being developed in partnership with new investors Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide. FinLLM is an industry-aligned LLM, aiming to set the standard for the ‘transparent, responsible and ethical adoption of generative AI across UK financial services.’

Post investment, the team developing FinLLM will be based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

The funding round was led by Puma Private Equity with participation from Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and existing investors Par Equity and Scottish Enterprise.

Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, comments: “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.

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“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.”