Finbourne secures $70M funding to enhance financial data processing technology for AI applications

Companies in fields like financial services and insurance live and die by their data — specifically, how well they can use it to understand what people and businesses will do next, a process that is becoming increasingly dominated by AI. Now, a startup called Finbourne, founded out of London’s financial center, has built a platform to help financial companies organize and use more of their data in AI and other models. It’s announcing £55 million ($70 million) in funding, which it will use to expand its reach outside of the Square Mile.

Highland Europe and strategic backer AVP (the venture arm of insurance giant AXA) are co-leading the Series B, which values the company at just over £280 million ($356 million) post-money.

Thomas McHugh, the CEO who co-founded Finbourne, told TechCrunch that he came up with the idea for the startup after many years of working as a senior quant in the city, most of those spent at the Royal Bank of Scotland. One of those years was 2008, the year that RBS, at that time the world’s largest bank, dramatically found itself on the brink of collapse after being overexposed to the subprime lending contagion.

The major shift played out internally in the form of a huge reorganization.

Previously, the whole of the bank was organized in a series of business silos, which resulted not just in how people operated, but how the data within them operated, too. All of that cost a fortune to run, costs that urgently needed to be cut. “We had to rip hundreds of millions of costs out of the business in... <完整内容请阅读原文>