Puma VCT 13 and Puma Alpha VCT have made a follow-on investment into Aveni, the UK’s leading AI fintech specialist in wealth management and banking, as part of a £12 million funding round for the business. The round was supported by new and existing investors alongside Puma including PXN Ventures, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Scottish Enterprise. 

This builds on Puma’s original investment in July 2024, when it deployed £5.9 million into Aveni and led the company’s Series A round, one of the largest Series A raises for a Scottish business that year.

The new investment will accelerate development of Aveni’s Unified Assurance Platform (UAP) and the launch of its new Agent Assure and Agent Approve solutions, purpose-built to assess the conduct risk of AI agents that interact with consumers in financial services.

Aveni is the established market leader in AI adoption across UK wealth and banking, with over seven years of live deployments and product development. Its products Aveni Assist, an AI productivity solution for advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, its AI compliance monitoring tool, are deployed across the UK’s leading banks, wealth managers and financial advisers. Underpinning both is FinLLM, Aveni’s proprietary suite of specialist small language models built for and utilising UK financial services data. 

Agentic AI adoption in financial services is accelerating, but deployment at scale is being held back by a critical gap in assurance. With just 2% of firms reporting adequate AI guardrails, the absence of robust, regulated oversight for AI agents that interact directly with consumers is the number one challenge for the industry. Regulators are clear that the mode of engagement - human or machine - is secondary to consumer outcomes, which must be assessed consistently across all interactions.

Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, said:

“The continued confidence shown by our existing investors is a powerful endorsement of the direction we’re taking. We have spent seven years building the models, the experience and the regulatory relationships that make us uniquely qualified to solve the hardest problem in AI adoption right now: how do you assure the conduct of an AI agent interacting with a real consumer?

"Agent Assure is our answer and this investment accelerates our ability to deliver our full platform at scale.”

Ben Leslie, Investment Director, Puma Growth Partners, commented: 

“The impact Aveni is making in deploying AI into UK financial services is already significant, and we continue to see a substantial growth opportunity ahead. With agentic AI adoption accelerating and regulators rightly focused on consistent consumer outcomes, robust assurance for AI agents is rapidly becoming a core requirement for the sector.

"As a standout example of Scotland’s growing strength as a technology hub, Aveni is well placed to lead this next phase. We are delighted to invest again from our Scotland office to support Joseph, Jamie, Professor Lexi Birch and the wider team as they scale the Unified Assurance Platform and launch Agent Assure.”