A four-year-old Swiss startup has raised a large chunk of change to capitalize on the burgeoning “agentic AI” motion.
Unique mentioned on Thursday that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding spherical that was led by London-based VC agency DN Capital and CommerzVentures, the funding offshoot of Germany’s Commerzbank.
“Agentic AI” is among the many greatest traits in expertise proper now, although there isn’t any one definition of what an AI agent really is. The core underlying idea is that an AI agent must be able to rather more than a easy chatbot, with the flexibility to make selections and do a variety of duties — something from doing all your on-line purchasing and submitting expense experiences to bettering effectivity in factories.
Founded in Zurich in 2021 by CEO Manuel Grenacher, CCO Michelle Heppler, and CTO Andreas Hauri (pictured above), Unique desires to energy an agentic AI workforce for monetary companies equivalent to banking, insurance coverage, and personal fairness.
This means automating workflows throughout areas equivalent to analysis, compliance, and KYC (“know your buyer”). Unique gives a bunch of customizable AI brokers out-the-box, one among which is an funding analysis agent that attracts on inner and exterior data to offer solutions to natural-language queries.
There’s additionally a due diligence agent, which analyzes paperwork equivalent to assembly transcripts and compares them with previous evaluations to counsel potential questions that financial institution personnel ought to ask.
The firm was initially centered on AI-powered video for gross sales groups, however within the intervening years it advanced into one thing akin to a “co-pilot for finance groups.” And in 2023, Unique went reside with Swiss non-public nationwide financial institution Pictet, which Unique additionally counts as a strategic investor.
Unique additionally has different big-name Swiss monetary establishments as prospects, together with UBP and Graubündner Kantonalbank.
With a contemporary $30 million within the financial institution, Unique says it plans to speed up its worldwide enlargement, with a selected give attention to the U.S. market. The firm has raised a complete of $53 million up to now.
