Gradient Labs, a London-based startup building AI agents for financial services, announced it has extended its Series A to $26 million. The company was founded in 2023 by three former Monzo employees: Dimitri Masin, Neal Lathia, and Danai Antoniou. Their core argument is straightforward: banks spend too much time and money on operational work that AI can handle, and general-purpose tools are not built for the job.
Banks are among the most data-rich organizations in the world. And yet a large share of their day-to-day work is still done manually. Staff read through documents, make debt collection calls, review disputed transactions, and check identity records against compliance requirements. None of these tasks require deep human judgment. They are repetitive, time-intensive, and costly to run at scale. The agentic AI market in financial services was valued at roughly $5.5 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $33 billion by 2030, pointing to broad recognition across the industry that automation is coming, even if adoption has been slow.
The $26 million round was led by Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures, with follow-on investment from Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital.
Most banks have invested heavily in technology, but the operational layer underneath has changed less than the customer-facing one. Someone still has to handle a disputed charge, verify a business's identity documents, or call a borrower who has missed a payment. These are the processes Gradient Labs is targeting.
The founders' view is that a general-purpose AI assistant cannot do this work reliably. Financial workflows are regulated, meaning every step has legal implications and needs to be documented and defensible. Gradient Labs refers to its approach as "vertical AI," meaning each agent is built for a specific regulated task rather than being a flexible all-purpose tool. Each one carries built-in compliance checks, guardrails, and test scenarios for its particular domain.
The numbers the company reports are worth noting. Over the past year, revenue grew 900%. Its agents now serve more than 32 million end users across clients including Wise, Monzo, Zego, Current, Stash, and Rho. Customer satisfaction scores in every deployment have come in higher than those recorded by human teams, with some reaching 98%.
Gradient Labs has expanded from a single agent into a suite of three specialists. The Lending Agent covers the full borrower lifecycle, from a missed payment to outbound collections calls to an agreed repayment plan. The Disputes Agent handles everything from intake and evidence gathering through to chargeback filing. A KYB Agent, where KYB stands for Know Your Business, runs identity and document checks on business customers. The agents share memory and context, so when a customer's situation touches more than one process, the relevant agents coordinate automatically.
Voice AI is a significant part of the product. Gradient Labs runs live phone calls for collections, claims intake, and customer support, and the company says this is the hardest channel to automate in regulated financial services. US expansion is a stated priority for the new funds, building on existing clients in that market.
The company also offers a performance guarantee: if an agreed deployment does not deliver the promised results, the customer gets their money back. That kind of commitment is not common in enterprise software.
Dimitri Masin, CEO, joined Monzo as an early employee and went on to lead its data science and financial crime function. Neal Lathia, CTO, built the machine learning infrastructure at Monzo that underpins its fraud detection and operational systems. Danai Antoniou, Chief Scientist, led development of what the company describes as an industry-first fraud detection system at the bank.
After leaving Monzo, the three spent fourteen months building the product in stealth before launching their first AI agent in 2024. That agent outperformed the best human support staff on Monzo's own teams, posting customer satisfaction scores of up to 98%. The company now has more than 40 employees and a product that covers lending, disputes, identity verification, insurance claims, and general customer service.
Each agent ships with compliance built in, covering frameworks including the FCA Consumer Duty in the UK, the EU AI Act, and US regulations Regulation E and Regulation Z. PSD2, the European payments directive, is also covered. Clients do not have to configure these requirements themselves.
"We believe that banks should run on auto-pilot. The customer operations, compliance, and back-office work that consume most of a bank's energy today should be handled by AI agents that are provably compliant at every step, freeing teams to focus on what matters most to their customers, and deliver it at a fraction of today's cost." — Dimitri Masin, CEO and Co-Founder of Gradient Labs
Gradient Labs raised a seed round in 2024 led by LocalGlobe, then closed an initial Series A of $13 million in July 2025 led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Exceptional Capital.
The Series A has now been extended to $26 million. Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures joined as new lead investors. Octopus Ventures is a UK-based firm focused on technology and life sciences. CommerzVentures is the investment arm of Commerzbank, one of Germany's largest banks, which gives its participation a practical dimension beyond the capital itself.
The company serves clients across the US, UK, and Europe, and the investor base now reflects that geographic spread.
