The Future of Financial Intelligence

If you’ve worked at an investment bank or asset manager, if you’ve seen the hours disappear into templating and updating models, cross-checking filings, or creating the same pages in nearly identical decks time and time again…you know that something is broken. The work is meant to be intellectual. In practice, it’s often manual, reactive, and siloed.

Finster is building the AI-native platform that replaces all of that, and we’re thrilled to lead their Series A, joining a fantastic roster of existing investors including Peak XV and Hoxton Ventures.

Not just any vertical LLM wrapper can tackle the complexity of the regulation, governance, and data that surround the financial services industry. But this is exactly why we face such a formidable challenge, coupled with an equally as exciting opportunity.

In order to cross the AI chasm in earnest, financial institutions must have access to domain-specific systems that can ingest data, reason across sources, and produce traceable, high-fidelity outputs. Finster has built exactly that: an advanced platform to automate hours of work with queries and tasks encompassing research, data, and reports. But the most interesting aspect isn’t the UI. It’s how tightly Finster fits into institutional muscle memory; and the proof is already in the usage rates and user feedback.

Those with the AI expertise to create a sophisticated enough product to resonate so deeply are few and far between. Sid Jayakumar stands out from the crowd. Sid joined DeepMind as their first undergraduate intern, and for the subsequent seven years he helped build the plumbing behind deep learning and LLMs before most of the world knew what they were. What makes him special is not just technical depth; it’s the intersection of financial services insights and clarity of vision for what he knows should exist for this industry.

Since meeting Sid and backing him early, the discipline and speed with which he has built Finster has been outstanding - and has led us to double down this time around.

Most importantly, in recent months, Sid has gone on to attract a world-class team by his side. Chris Andrews joins from his position as Global COO of Research at Morgan Stanley; Veeral Manek brings product expertise from his years leading Wealth and Trading at Revolut; and Charles Poliacof adds a long tenure of financial data sales, including as CRO of Visible Alpha.

Although Finster isn't the first mover in this space, they are already going head to head with even the most “hyped” and well funded players. Most others have fallen short for predictable reasons: their output is untrustworthy; their users are innovation teams, not real analysts; their product adds steps instead of removing them. Although AI-driven FOMO initially prompted a flurry of POC launches throughout the industry, beyond flashy branding and prominent headlines, it is product quality alone that will drive conversion to durable, long-term contracts. On this dimension in particular, Finster shines.

From day one, Finster has been laser focused on what really counts. And it’s already paying off, having landed full-scale deployments including with Tier 1 banks. In an industry whose decision-making and deployment typically aren’t renowned for their speed, the pace of play is turning heads. The advent of AI for financial services has created an incentive to reach a new operating velocity.

At FinTech Collective, we believe adoption of vertical AI agents are an imperative to survival for financial institutions: to control costs, to boost efficiency, to enhance organisational synergies, and to optimise output.

To do so effectively though, solutions must integrate deeply and seamlessly into existing data and workflows. This is no easy task, and Finster’s success is exactly what make it sticky, defensible, and game-changing. What we see in Finster is the beginning of something rare: an AI-native platform that analysts across major financial institutions actually trust - and use.

Finster has already made the leap from “demoable” to indispensable. In an era full of noise but routinely lacking depth, Finster is building something immensely credible. Financial data and analytics already makes up a $35+ billion/year industry across investment banks and asset managers. As AI transitions to a core competency rather than an exploratory project, we believe the base case for Finster is a multi billion dollar outcome as budgets are redirected to align with the relative and absolute upside of this spend.

That’s why we invested. And why we’re thrilled to partner with this standout team.