One of the big stars of last year’s FinovateAsia, Finn AI, continues to make big headlines. The company, whose AI-powered virtual assistant technology has earned it two Finovate Best of Show awards, has picked up $11 million in new funding (CAD $14 million). The Series A round was led by Yaletown Partners and Flying Fish Partners, and featured participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, 1843 Capital, and angel investors.
“We’ve seen great progress in our business over the last twelve months, doubling our team to over 50 across North America and acquiring a number of major new customers and partners,” co-founder and CEO of Finn AI Jake Tyler said. “As the market moves beyond early experiments into scale production deployments we are seeing greater demand for our proven enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform.”
Tyler added that the funding would support the company’s growth in North America and Europe. The investment will also enable Finn AI to innovate on its enterprise technology and extend its core solution to support additional banking and personal finance capabilities for its current customers.
As part of the investment, Eric Bukovinsky of Yaletown Partners and Frank Chang of Flying Fish Partners will join Finn AI’s board of directors.
At FinovateFall 2017 last September, Finn AI demonstrated how its virtual banking assistant, integrated with Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant, could be used to complete everyday banking and personal finance tasks. Leveraging bot technology and artificial intelligence, Finn AI’s solution supports payments, budgeting, and savings. And while the virtual assistant is capable of answering a wide range of support queries without any human intervention, the technology is also able to bring in human agents to respond to more complex requests.
“Banks around the world are rapidly adopting Conversational AI to deepen relationships with customers, drive sales, and migrate routine, high volume tasks and queries to digital self-serve channels,” Bukovinsky said. “Finn AI has proven it can deliver with major banks across North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. We’re excited to support them in this next stage of their growth.”
Finn AI was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Visa Canada, leveraging the Visa Development Platform APIs to enhance its conversational AI technology. This spring, Finn AI teamed up with Bank of Montreal (BMO) to power the bank’s personal banking chatbot, BMO Bolt. The company also collaborated with Nicaragua’s biggest bank, Banpro, in March, to offer the company’s first Spanish-speaking virtual banking assistant.