Finn.ai, a Canadian developer of an AI-powered virtual assistant for banking and personal finance, has landed C$3m.
The funding round was co-led by Yaletown Partners, Flying Fish Partners and John Livingston, former CEO of Absolute Software Corp. It also received participation from an angel syndicate comprised of senior technology and banking executive. The Vancouver-based company 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.
Finn.ai co-founder and CEO Jake Tyler said: “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.”
With customers on four continents, the start-up delivers service in three languages, helping banks and credit unions ‘transform customer engagement in a digital and cognitive age’. It recently announced a collaboration with ATB Financial, making the first full-featured personal banking assistant available through FB messenger to ATB’s 700,000 customers.
The new funding will be used to expand its team of data scientists, engineers and banking industry experts to meet the needs of the Company’s rapidly-growing customer network, as well as supporting its continued expansion into the US and global markets. Along with the new funds, 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.
“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.”
Canadian FinTech
Despite progressively increasing between 2014 and 2016 total Canadian FinTech investments look set to fall in 2017. The total amount invested in Canadian FinTech companies grew at a CAGR of 25.6% between 2014-2016. The total number of deals also progressively increased in the same period.
The first half of this year saw a slowdown in investments in Canadian FinTech Companies with only $120.2m invested across 20 deals. This amounts to only 21% of the total investments in 2016, suggesting that investments in 2017 will not reach levels set in 2016. The largest deal in Canadian FinTech in 2016 went to Real Matters which develops software for the mortgage lending and insurance industries with a focus on Real Estate. The company received $74m in a deal closed in March 2016.
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