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 Sequence 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 tendencies in know-how proper now, although there is no such thing as a one definition of what an AI agent really is. The core underlying idea is that an AI agent ought to be able to rather more than a easy chatbot, with the power to make selections and do a spread of duties — something from doing all your on-line buying and submitting expense stories to enhancing effectivity in factories.
Based in Zurich in 2021 by CEO Manuel Grenacher, CCO Michelle Heppler, and CTO Andreas Hauri (pictured above), Distinctive needs to energy an agentic AI workforce for monetary providers resembling banking, insurance coverage, and personal fairness.
This implies automating workflows throughout areas resembling analysis, compliance, and KYC (“know your buyer”). Distinctive gives a bunch of customizable AI brokers out-the-box, one in every of which is an investment research agent that pulls on inner and exterior data to supply solutions to natural-language queries.
There’s additionally a due diligence agent, which analyzes paperwork resembling assembly transcripts and compares them with previous evaluations to recommend potential questions that financial institution personnel ought to ask.
The corporate was initially centered on AI-powered video for gross sales groups, nevertheless it advanced its focus within the intervening years. Then in 2023, its “co-pilot for finance” platform went live with Swiss non-public nationwide financial institution Pictet, which Distinctive additionally counts as a strategic investor.
Distinctive has different big-name Swiss monetary establishments as clients, together with UBP and Graubündner Kantonalbank.
With a recent $30 million within the financial institution, Distinctive says it plans to speed up its worldwide growth, with a specific concentrate on the U.S. market. The corporate has raised a complete of $53 million to this point.