Gradient Labs, a startup building AI customer service agents for the financial sector founded by three former Monzo employees, has secured a $13m (£9.5m) investment less than a year after closing its first seed round.
Regulated industries such as finance and law are simultaneously ripe for AI adoption, characterised by large amounts of time-consuming administrative processes, and at a significant risk from the influence of AI, due to the extensive legal requirements associated with their services.
Honed by years at one of Europe’s most successful digital banks, the Gradient Labs team claims it can help with the latter issue with the world’s “first compliant AI platform for financial services”.
Financial services firms have already been experimenting with customer service chatbots powered by AI, however, the functionality of these bots has so far been fairly limited.
As Gradient Labs puts it: “Most CX AI solutions focus on the 20% of the experience that customers see: chat and call conversations.”
This is less of an issue for multinational banks with enormous teams of human customer support staff to provide more complex services, but for many modern fintechs, customer growth can significantly outpaces staffing growth.
Gradient Labs has claimed its platform, as well as automating that 20% of customer service, can also handle the rest, automating “critical operational processes that truly shape the customer journey”.
This means document processing, screening for fraud or sanctions and supporting a customer in a vulnerable situation at any hour.
The company launched its AI agent in November 2024, months after securing a £2.8m seed investment. It has so far experienced solid growth, onboarding the likes of Plum, Zego, Lendable and Yonder as customers.
It has also claimed to have partnered with “one of the largest regulated banks in the UK”, though it has not specified which one.
Gradient Labs’ Series A round was led by Redpoint Ventures and included participation from Exceptional Capital, Liquid 2, LocalGlobe and Puzzle Ventures.
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