Edinburgh, June 2026 – University of Edinburgh startup Aveni, a leading AI specialist in wealth management, financial advice, and banking, has announced a £12 million funding round led by PXN Ventures, with support from existing investors including Puma Growth Partners, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, and Scottish Enterprise.
The investment will accelerate the development of Aveni’s Unified Assurance Platform (UAP) and the launch of its new Agent Assure and Agent Approve solutions. These tools are designed to assess and manage the conduct risk of AI agents interacting directly with consumers in financial services — a critical gap in the industry as agentic AI adoption accelerates.
With only 2 percent of firms reporting adequate AI guardrails, regulators have emphasized that consumer outcomes must be assessed consistently, regardless of whether the engagement is human or machine. Aveni’s Agent Assure addresses this challenge by enabling firms to monitor AI agents alongside human interactions in a single unified view. Together with Aveni Assist, Aveni Detect, and Agent Approve, the platform represents the industry’s first comprehensive framework for assuring both human and AI-driven consumer interactions at scale.
Underpinning Aveni’s products is FinLLM, a proprietary suite of specialist small language models built using UK financial services data. This foundation ensures that Aveni’s solutions are tailored to the unique regulatory and operational needs of the sector.
Aveni’s Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Professor Lexi Birch, holds the Personal Chair of Multilingual Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics and is a Fellow of the University’s Generative AI Lab. The company was supported at its inception in 2018 by Edinburgh Innovations and received early seed funding from Old College Capital (OCC), which continues to back the founders. Its £11 million Series A raise in 2024 was one of the largest in Scottish business that year.
Katharine Fox, Head of Investment at OCC, praised Aveni’s focus on trust and assurance as a benchmark for responsible AI use, while CEO Joseph Twigg highlighted the company’s seven years of model development, regulatory engagement, and market experience as the foundation for solving the hardest problem in AI adoption today: assuring the conduct of AI agents interacting with real consumers.
This latest funding round positions Aveni at the forefront of responsible AI in financial services, combining innovation with regulatory alignment to unlock the potential of agentic AI while safeguarding consumer trust.
