AI meets financial management — from the mass affluent to micro-SMEs
This week’s stories trace how AI is reshaping the financial backbone — from wealth management for the mass affluent to real-time decision-making for small businesses. As younger, digitally savvy users and a shifting economic climate drive demand for smarter financial tools, human expertise and machine intelligence are converging into a new model of advice.
In our Q&A, Ajit Barik, founder of Wyzr, shares how his startup is building an AI-powered CFO for micro-SMEs — helping business owners manage cash flow, plan ahead, and make confident decisions without a full finance team.
Meanwhile, Clove, Resistant AI, and Nova Credit reflect how this wave is scaling: automating wealth management, defending against fraud where LLM agents fall short, and reimagining credit with real-time cash-flow insights.
Together, these shifts mark a broader movement — from static finance to adaptive intelligence — where the line between human judgment and algorithmic precision grows ever thinner.
A Q&A with Ajit Barik of Wyzr on the Future of AI-Powered Finance
As economic uncertainty and automation reshape the financial landscape, millions of small businesses face the same challenge: gaining financial clarity without the resources of a full finance team. Enter Wyzr, a UK-based startup creating an AI-powered CFO designed specifically for micro and early-stage businesses.
Founded by former Deutsche Bank trader Ajit Barik, Wyzr brings together his dual background in finance and computer science to automate the kind of insight once reserved for large enterprises. In this Q&A, Ajit shares how Wyzr is turning AI into an accessible financial partner — one that saves time, speaks plain language, and helps small business owners make smarter decisions with confidence.
1. Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s)
I am Ajit Barik, the founder of Wyzr. I spent 15 years in financial services, including 11 years as a trader at Deutsche Bank. I studied computer science at one of India’s top engineering schools and started my career as a developer. Before Wyzr, I built a bootstrapped personal finance app and later pivoted to a B2B AI-powered CFO solution.
Read more from the interview here: http://www.fintechforum.de/qa-with-ajit-barik-of-wyzr-ai-powered-cfo-for-micro-smes/
Deal highlights this week include:
Market shifts like younger, digitally savvy users, upcoming wealth transfer and the opportunity to serve the mass affluent segment means scaling financial advice and automating wealth management continue to attract funding. I believe the digital plus human-in-the-loop approaches e.g. the one from Clove will be key winners.
Clove, a UK wealth management startup co-founded by the former boss of fintech unicorn Paddle, has emerged from stealth with $14 million in pre-seed funding…The Financial Conduct Authority has estimated that people who receive financial advice may be up to 10% better off in subsequent years than those who do not… With Clove, we are seeking to break the traditional economics of financial advice by combining the expertise of human advisers with the efficiency of AI.
Finally, some news about what LLM-based agents can’t do – and a startup that will make money fighting off hallucinating, insecure agents!
Resistant AI, the leading provider of native artificial intelligence models for financial crime and fraud prevention, today announced a $25 million Series B funding round…The new funding comes as the anti-fraud and regtech market is being transformed by fully-native or bolted-on agentic solutions that replace static workflows with cheaper, smarter adaptive ones. However, these large language model-based agents are structurally unable to perform the quantitative risk analysis needed to combat fraud and fincrime, suffer from high systemic hallucination rates of 10-30%, and have proven extremely difficult to keep secure from adversarial manipulation.
Using bank-transaction data for affordability/credit decisions is almost taken for granted here in Europe / the UK, but is finally gathering momentum in the US where regulation around open banking access has been patchy.
Nova Credit, a leading credit infrastructure and analytics company, today announced it raised $35 million in Series D funding led by Socium Ventures.…The funding arrives as cash flow underwriting reaches an inflection point, with lenders, property managers, and financial service providers increasingly recognizing that traditional credit bureau data alone provides an incomplete and therefore inaccurate picture of a consumer’s financial health. Cash flow underwriting offers a more granular, real-time view of financial behavior, enabling businesses to responsibly accelerate growth.
Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of 20K+, reach out to Samarth Shekhar or Frank Schwab.
FUNDING ROUNDS
Filipino-led startup Ryder secures $3.2-M backing from tech investor Tim Draper
Filipino entrepreneur Louise Ivan Valencia Payawal has raised $3.2 million in seed funding for his tech startup Ryder, drawing support from billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, founder of Draper Associates and an early backer of Tesla, SpaceX, and Skype.
The funding round also included investments from Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Asymmetric’s Joe McCann, and venture firms Borderless, Semantic, Smape, and VeryEarly.
Ryder’s flagship product, Ryder One, is a crypto hardware wallet designed to make securing and using digital assets easier and safer.
It features TapSafe, a tap-based recovery system that removes the need for traditional seed phrases — often seen as a single point of failure in crypto storage.
https://newsbytes.ph/2025/10/16/ph-startup-ryder-secures-3-2-m-backing-from-tech-investor-tim-draper
Fintech startup GoodScore raises $13 million in funding round led by Peak XV Partners
Fintech startup GoodScore has secured $13 million in a funding round led by Peak XV Partners. The Bengaluru-based company offers AI-driven insights and tools to help users monitor and improve their credit scores. Funds will be used to enhance AI advisory, expand teams, and grow its credit marketplace.
Fintech startup GoodScore has raised $13 million in a funding round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Stellaris Venture Partners and Saison Capital.
Founded in 2023 by Sanchit Bansal, the Bengaluru-based startup helps users monitor and improve their credit scores through personalised, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights and repayment tracking tools.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/funding/fintech-startup-goodscore-raises-13-million-in-funding-round-led-by-peak-xv-partners/articleshow/124521798.cms
Wealthtech Clove emerges from stealth with $14m in funding
Clove, a UK wealth management startup co-founded by the former boss of fintech unicorn Paddle, has emerged from stealth with $14 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Accel, with participation from Kindred Capital, Air Street Capital, and angels, including Cleo’s Barney Hussey-Yeo, Erez Mathan from GoCardless), and Gideon Valkin, ex-Monzo and ClearScore.
The Financial Conduct Authority has estimated that people who receive financial advice may be up to 10% better off in subsequent years than those who do not.
Clove – cofounded by Paddle founder Christian Owens and Alex Loizou – is aiming to provide this advice through a mixture of humans and AI.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/46765/wealthtech-clove-emerges-from-stealth-with-14m-in-funding
Resistant AI raises $25m in series B funding
Resistant AI, the leading provider of native artificial intelligence models for financial crime and fraud prevention, today announced a $25 million Series B funding round.
The round was led by DTCP, with strong participation from existing investors including Experian, GV, and Notion Capital who are doubling down on their investment. The company, which was breakeven in September, will use the capital to solidify its position as a profitable EU AI champion by expanding its document fraud detection and transaction monitoring offerings into new territories and partnerships, and build out its threat intelligence capabilities.
https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/107466/resistant-ai-raises-25m-in-series-b-funding
Nova Credit Raises $35M Series D to Accelerate Cash Flow Underwriting Revolution
Socium Ventures led the funding round expected to drive expansion of the industry-leading Nova Credit Platform as demand for real-time financial data and analytics surges
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nova Credit, a leading credit infrastructure and analytics company, today announced it raised $35 million in Series D funding led by Socium Ventures, a venture firm backed by Cox Enterprises, to accelerate the growth of the Nova Credit Platform.
The funding arrives as cash flow underwriting reaches an inflection point, with lenders, property managers, and financial service providers increasingly recognizing that traditional credit bureau data alone provides an incomplete and therefore inaccurate picture of a consumer’s financial health. Cash flow underwriting offers a more granular, real-time view of financial behavior, enabling businesses to responsibly accelerate growth.
Liberate bags $50M at $300M valuation to bring AI deeper into insurance back offices
Liberate, an AI startup automating insurance operations, has raised $50 million in a round led by Battery Ventures as it looks to scale its agentic deployments across carriers and agencies globally.
The all-equity round values the three-year-old startup at $300 million post-money, with participation from new investor Canapi Ventures and returning backers Redpoint Ventures, Eclipse, and Commerce Ventures.
The insurance industry has been navigating a difficult stretch, with rising operational costs, legacy system constraints, and increasing customer expectations. Specifically in the non-life segment, global premium growth is projected to slow through 2026, driven by heightened competition, weaker rate momentum, and new cost pressures, including tariffs, per a recent report by Deloitte. While some carriers experimented with AI, many early efforts stalled due to fragmented data and inflexible workflows.
ERP platform Campfire fuels up with $65m Series B
The San Francisco-based start-up recently launched a proprietary large accounting model to support its ERP platform, claiming “95% accuracy on key workflows”.
Campfire, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) start-up founded by former Invoice2go VP John Glasgow in 2023, has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel and new investor Ribbit. The raise comes just over three months after a $35 million Series A, also led by Accel, and brings Campfire’s total funding to more than $100 million.
Foundation Capital participated in this latest round alongside Y Combinator, which incubated Campfire in its Summer 2023 Batch, with additional angel support from Ramp co-founder and CTO Karim Atiyeh, Snowflake finance VP Brad Floering, Clay controller Steve Sidhu, Supabase CFO Scott Buxton, and Naeem Ishaq, former EVP, CFO and chief strategy officer at Checkr.
Fintech Upgrade raises $165 million, targets IPO in 12 to 18 months
(Reuters) -Consumer finance fintech Upgrade said on Thursday it raised $165 million in its latest funding round, nearly four years after its last external financing during the height of the 2021 fintech boom.
The round valued Upgrade at $7.3 billion pre-money, according to a source familiar with the matter, a 21.7% premium to its previous valuation.
“We’re probably 12 to 18 months away from an IPO, so we wanted to give the team members some liquidity before IPO,” Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche told Reuters in an interview.
Fintech startup investment surged in 2021 on low rates and abundant capital, but cooled in subsequent years as inflation rose and the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fintech-upgrade-raises-165-million-110853336.html
Deel hits $17.3 billion valuation, aims to expand globally
Oct 16 (Reuters) – Payroll startup Deel said on Thursday it raised $300 million in a funding round, led by new investor Ribbit Capital alongside existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue Management, valuing the company at $17.3 billion.
The San Francisco, California-based company said it plans to use the fresh capital for acquisitions and expand its payroll infrastructure with a goal of offering native payroll in more than 100 countries by 2029.
The Series E fundraise comes amid its ongoing litigation with rival Rippling, which has sued Deel alleging racketeering, trade-secret misappropriation and unfair competition, while Deel filed a defamation suit against Rippling in April, calling the claims a multi-year smear campaign.
Coinbase invests in India’s CoinDCX
Coinbase is targeting India and the Middle East after investing in Mumbai-based crypto exchange CoinDCX at a $2.45 billion post-money valuation.
The size of the investment was not disclosed but Coinbase has previously participated in several CoinDCX funding rounds.
Shan Aggarwal, chief business officer, Coinbase, notes: “With over 1.4 billion people, growing tech adoption, and over 100 million crypto owners, India and the Middle East are set to play a big role in the future of crypto.”
CoinDCX has secured a sizable chunk of the market, with over 20 million users and $165 billion in annualised transaction volumes as of July.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/46764/coinbase-invests-in-indias-coindcx
M&A
Ondo Finance Announces Acquisition of Oasis Pro to Support US Tokenized Securities Ecosystem
Ondo Finance is pleased to announce the completion of its acquisition of Oasis Pro, including its SEC-registered digital assets broker-dealer, alternative trading system (ATS), and transfer agent (TA) licenses. This acquisition provides the Ondo Finance group with a “comprehensive” set of SEC registrations to provide digital asset services in the United States.
With the acquisition finalized, Ondo Finance is now able to develop and provide regulated markets for tokenized securities, forming the foundation for a new era of blockchain-powered financial products.
Oasis Pro brings a full-stack digital asset infrastructure to Ondo, “enabling a wide range of tokenized securities functions.”
Novata Acquires Atlas Metrics
Novata, a NYC-based provider of a sustainability data management platform for private markets, acquired Atlas Metrics, a Berlin, Germany-based provider of a sustainability performance and reporting platform.
The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
Together, Novata and Atlas Metrics now will support more than 400 clients and 13K+ companies worldwide, equipping investors, banks, and corporates with the tools they need to collect, report, and act on sustainability data.
Since its founding in 2021, and led by CEO Wladimir Nikoluk, Atlas Metrics has become a market leader across Europe, serving hundreds of banks and a broad range of venture capital firms. Its technology combines scalable architecture with intuitive workflows and AI-driven insights to simplify sustainability reporting and risk identification.
https://www.finsmes.com/2025/10/novata-acquires-atlas-metrics.html
Lendscape Acquires WinFactor
Lendscape, a San Luis Obispo, CA-based company which specializes in working capital finance technology, acquired WinFactor, a Lakeland, FL-based provider of factoring software solutions in North America.
The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
The acquisition will improve the Lendscape’s growth strategy, extending its presence in North America and further enhancing its technology portfolio.
Led by CEO Patrick de la Roza, WinFactor enables factoring companies to improve operations, portfolio management, and deliver better services to their clients.
Led by CEO Martin Morrin, Lendscape is the world’s leading technology provider for all forms of secured finance.
https://www.finsmes.com/2025/10/lendscape-acquires-winfactor.html
As we close this week’s edition, the message is clear: finance is becoming more intelligent, more adaptive, and more human-centered than ever. From AI-powered CFOs and automated wealth platforms to real-time credit insights and fraud detection beyond LLM limits, fintech founders are rewriting how money is managed, safeguarded, and understood.
What unites these stories isn’t just technology — it’s the ambition to make financial expertise accessible to everyone, from global investors to micro-entrepreneurs. The shift from static tools to adaptive intelligence is well underway.
Stay tuned, stay curious, and keep watching the innovators turning financial complexity into clarity.