Siri who?

Cleo, a London-based fintech startup that has developed a virtual assistant for personal finance, just raised $700,000 in a round of seed funding from intrigued angels.

According to Crunchbase, one of those angels is Niklas Zennström, whom some might remember as the mind (and founder) of video-chat service Skype. Altogether the round consisted of eight angel investors, including Zennström.

Cleo is designed to be a consumer’s financial assistant, assisting with queries concerning everything from “what’s my balance?” to telling the user how much they’ve spent during the month at a specific restaurant or merchant.

Users can also use Cleo to set reminders or alerts to help with spend or budgeting.

Moreover, Cleo, while described by the company as a chatbot, can answer via really any medium the user decides. Users can text the bot, or chat with it via voice through the Cleo app, through Facebook Messenger (of course), and even through voice assistants already in the home, such as Amazon’s Echo assistant and Google Home.

AI assistants created for a variety of tasks have been capturing industry interest for some time now, with methods of paying or transacting via voice growing in popularity thanks to projects like the Amazon Go store.

While these assistants have in no way replaced mobile or even cards in terms of consumer financial popularity (recent reports claim that despite Alexa’s prolific collection of apps only 3% of users will continue to use an app week-over-week after trying it out), the potentials of voice are not to be dismissed.

Offering an intelligent, AI-powered assistant that users can also interact with via text, should they so choose, might go a long way towards making the use of voice for financial means more palatable to the average consumer.

To learn more about financial chatbots, join us in San Jose on March 6-7 for Bank Innovation 2017, where the best conversations in fintech take place. Please request your invitation here.