Participated · Equity · Jan 2024

Axyon AI, founded in 2016, offers predictive AI-powered solutions for the investment management industry from Modena, Italy. Its core product set includes AI-driven analytics, AI-powered factors for model optimization, and the AI-Compass alert system for real-time market insights. The company leverages advanced artificial intelligence and deep learning to help investment managers optimize decision-making and enhance investment strategies. Axyon AI plans to use newly raised funds to expand market coverage, further develop its investment management solutions, and enhance AI explainability in the financial sector. The article does not disclose revenue, user counts, or other operating metrics. The company was founded by Giacomo Barigazzi, Daniele Grassi and Jacopo Credi and emphasizes scalable, research-led AI technologies that deliver timely signals and predictive insights. Axyon AI is a Modena, Italy–based AI fintech company led by CEO Daniele Grassi that develops AI-driven tools to uncover alpha opportunities and optimize indices on equities and ETFs. Its core products include AI-powered asset rankings and active indices that aim to help asset managers navigate complex market dynamics. The company integrates AI insights with index construction to provide more precise investment-management signals. Axyon intends to use the new funding to catalyze commercial expansion and advance its technological development initiatives. The round consolidates prior convertible-note financing from 2022, reflecting continued investor support for the company’s product roadmap. The company will leverage the partnership with new and existing investors to accelerate go-to-market efforts. Axyon AI offers a fully automated, web-based platform (Axyon IRIS®) that delivers AI-powered forecasts and investment strategies to asset managers. The company leverages advanced AI and deep learning for probabilistic time-series modelling to forecast and nowcast complex multivariate stochastic processes. Axyon says its models have proven performance and have become an integral part of some clients' investment processes. The firm plans to use new funding to evolve the Axyon IRIS flagship product and to support continued research & development. Management also intends to use the capital to support international expansion and to reinforce team growth.

Participated · Series D · May 2023

OpenFin builds a web-based OS and application interface aimed at financial services to unify desktop apps and workflows. Its platform offers a single search interface—what the CEO described as “Spotlight Search on steroids”—to search across apps, reduce the industry’s so-called “toggle tax,” and drive richer workflows. The company says its software is used by more than 3,800 banks and wealth and asset management firms across 60+ countries. OpenFin recently closed a $35M Series D, bringing total capital raised to $82M. It competes with enterprise browser-like offerings such as Island and counts major banks and trading firms among its customers and investors. The company has expanded its footprint with a deal with the London Stock Exchange and into the U.S. government sector via a strategic partnership and investment from In-Q-Tel. OpenFin offers a desktop operating platform that sits above native operating systems (Windows, macOS) to let users view, use, and integrate multiple apps on one screen. The platform automatically synchronizes updates across apps and allows customers to build and integrate custom apps, reducing time lost to app switching and duplicate data entry. OpenFin targets knowledge-worker productivity and aims to displace traditional web browsers such as Chrome and Edge, competing with emerging browser startups like Island. The company emphasizes security and user experience as differentiators. Historically focused on finance customers including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, OpenFin is expanding into the government sector through a partnership with In-Q-Tel. Its recent funding includes a $10 million investment from ING Ventures and an additional undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel. OpenFin is a NYC-based provider of a web-based operating system for financial firms. Led by CEO Mazy Dar, its OS is used at more than 1,500 banks and buy-side firms across nearly 200,000 desktops in 60+ countries. The company also maintains offices in London. It raised an additional $5m as part of its Series C, bringing that round to $22m and total funding to date to $45m. Investors in the Series C include HSBC, Bain Capital Ventures, Barclays, CME Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, J.P. Morgan, NYCA Partners, Pivot Investment Partners and Wells Fargo. OpenFin said it will use the financing to expand its product offering into Asian markets and to fund new product initiatives. OpenFin provides an operating system for the financial services industry that enables easier app deployment, faster security assurances, and interoperability across desktop applications. Its platform prevents apps from accessing local file systems to simplify security reviews for banks and institutions. OpenFin launched OpenFin Cloud Services to let firms create private local app stores without coding. The company reports more than 1,500 major financial firms as customers, nearly 40 leading vendors, 15 of the world’s 20 largest banks, and over 1,000 apps built on the OS. Deployments exceed 200,000 desktops, and since its February 2017 Series B its deployments and headcount have more than doubled while its European presence has tripled. OpenFin plans to use new capital for hiring and to expand its footprint across more desktops globally, aiming to become the core operating infrastructure for financial application developers. OpenFin provides a common operating layer for financial desktop applications using a modern, open technology stack and Google’s Chromium engine to deliver a secure, sandboxed environment across Windows, Mac and Linux. The platform enables rapid development and ‘instant’ deployment of desktop apps, shrinking deployment and update cycles from 6–18 months to immediate rollout. OpenFin’s technology is licensed across over 100,000 desktops and is used by applications from 35 of the world’s largest banks and trading platforms. Customers use the platform to redesign and unify front‑end experiences for traders and other end users, and to deploy applications both in‑house and to buy‑ and sell‑side clients. Strategic partners are integrating with the platform—Euclid Opportunities said it is bringing NEX Optimisation services onto OpenFin—indicating enterprise fintech adoption. Financially, OpenFin announced a $15 million Series B and has raised $22 million in total venture funding to date.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2023

Weaviate builds an open-source, AI-native vector database that helps developers generate, store, and search embedding vectors and their corresponding objects. The company offers the Weaviate open source project and a managed Weaviate Cloud Service to remove operational overhead for users. Since its Series A in early 2022, Weaviate's open-source downloads have passed the 2 million mark, indicating strong adoption. Led by CEO Bob van Luijt, the company plans to use new funding to expand its team and accelerate development of both the open-source database and the cloud service. The product targets AI application developers who need scalable vector data management. The company is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. SeMI Technologies develops Weaviate, an open-source vector search engine that uses machine-learning-produced embeddings to enable semantic search and question-answering over unstructured data. Founded in 2019 by Bob van Luijt, Etienne Dilocker, and Micha Verhagen, the company positions Weaviate as an AI-first database to power search and recommendation systems in production. SeMI does not create the underlying models itself but integrates models from providers (e.g., Hugging Face or OpenAI) while offering tools, enterprise licenses, and managed services around the open-source core. Its software has been downloaded almost 750,000 times and has been growing roughly 30% per month; the company said downloads can correlate to enterprise license and managed-services sales. SeMI exhausted its seed funding and is now focused on scaling go-to-market, product development, and community growth, and beginning research where machine learning overlaps with computer science. Use cases span startups to medical applications and include demos such as genome vectorization and graph-embedding search.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2022

Sardine, headquartered in San Francisco, offers an agentic risk platform that unifies data across risk teams to stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Its platform leverages device intelligence and real-time risk scoring and is used by customers across retail, commercial, and wealth lines. Sardine’s fraud consortium profiles over 6 billion devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. The company counts customers such as FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com and is expanding its footprint in financial services. Recent commercial momentum includes a multi-year partnership with National Bank of Canada, which followed a live evaluation demonstrating improved fraud detection and reduced false positives.

Led · Series A · Jun 2022

PRODA provides a machine-learning trained, cloud-based SaaS solution that captures, standardises, validates, analyses and exchanges lease, property and unit-level rent roll data. The platform automates a previously manual and error-prone process and, according to the company, delivers up to a 90% reduction in overall processing time. PRODA’s software is used across 16 countries and is designed to handle data regardless of currency, language or property type. Launched in 2017, the product targets lenders, investors and asset managers within commercial real estate. The new funding is intended to help establish PRODA’s platform as the centralised hub for processing and analysing rent roll data. Management says the capital will accelerate product development and meet rapidly increasing demand.