Payso Inc., dba Finn.ai, a provider of AI-powered virtual assistant built for banking and personal finance, has secured a $3 million round of financing led by Yaletown Partners, Flying Fish Partners, and John Livingston, former CEO and Chairman of Absolute Software (TSX: ABT) with participation of an angel syndicate comprised of senior technology and banking executives.
Finn.ai will use the new funding to grow its team of data scientists, engineers and banking industry experts to meet the needs of its rapidly-growing customer network and to support its continued expansion into the U.S. and global markets.
“Finn.ai is built from the ground up specifically to help banks and credit unions transform the way they engage with customers ‒ making banking simpler, more accessible, more human, and ultimately helping to build trust and engagement between banks and their customers,” said Jake Tyler, co-founder and CEO of Finn.ai.
Coinciding with the raise, Finn.ai also announced the addition of banking industry veteran Carrie Russell as Strategic Executive Adviser. Russell will help develop and implement the company’s product roadmap and market engagement approach. Russell was previously Chief Marketing Officer at D+H (now Finastra) and SVP Retail Banking Products at TD Bank.
“The banking industry faces a real challenge in this new digital paradigm and needs to move beyond transactional banking to build deeper, more personal relationships with customers,” said Russell. “I believe Finn.ai is the right partner to do this, acting as a proactive virtual assistant to help customers understand, plan and take action to improve their financial lives.”
Finn.ai leverages a proprietary, best-in-class and domain-specific natural language understanding engine accompanied by a large banking and personal finance-specific language data model. The addition of Flying Fish Partners as investors speaks directly to the value of this innovative technology with a team that includes Geoff Harris, former Managing Director of the Voice and Natural Language business at Microsoft, and Frank Chang, who led Microsoft’s core engineering team in the same unit.
“Finn.ai has built a compelling, next-generation banking experience using state of the art AI tools,” said Chang. “We’re seeing many of the challenges we faced working on the Cortana team at Microsoft being solved by Finn.ai. We believe domain-specific solutions like Finn.ai will win in their chosen verticals versus more generalized platforms, and we are excited to partner with Finn.ai to help bring this to fruition.”
“We have invested in Finn.ai based on their proven capability to deploy their full-featured banking and personal finance assistant into market,” said Eric Bukovinsky, Partner, Yaletown Partners. “We expect this type of smart, conversational agent will quickly become table stakes for banks across the world.”
This raise announcement comes on the heels of the recent news of Finn.ai’s collaboration with ATB Financial, making the first full-featured personal banking assistant available through FB messenger to ATB’s 700,000 customers. Finn.ai is also the winner of the “Best of Show” award at last month’s Finovate Fall 2017 in New York City and Finovate Asia 2016.
photo credit: Finn.ai