Fintech funding picked up in the first quarter as financial institutions look to deploy AI. 

Global fintech funding rose to $12.1 billion, up 3.4% year over year in Q1, according to technology market intelligence firm CB Insights.  

The increase came despite the number of deals dropping to 762 from 1,074, with average deal size reaching $22.5 million in Q1, up from $20.3 million in 2025 and $13.2 million in 2024.   

Quarterly fintech funding and deal volume

Slash bags $100M 

Second-quarter funding started hot with AI-powered business banking platform Slash Financial raising $100 million in a series C round led by Ribbit Capital, according to an April 16 Slash release. The round brings Slash’s total funding to $160 million and its valuation to $1.4 billion, elevating the fintech to unicorn status, meaning its value has topped $1 billion. 

The money enables Slash to invest in its new AI agent, Twin, which is designed to handle businesses’ finances such as payments, invoice generation and account openings, according to the release.  

With Twin, Slash hopes to remove the “manual work from the day-to-day operation of a business,” Chief Executive Victor Cardenas told FinAi News. 

“Today, even simple financial tasks still require someone to log in, navigate a dashboard, pull reports, review invoices, issue cards or track down spend,” he said. “Twin is designed to replace a lot of that with a much simpler interaction model, where you can ask for what you need in plain language and have the system handle the work behind the scenes.” 

Cardenas said Twin can provide deeper insights into:

• Where spend is going;
• Which payments are due; and
• Operational issues that need attention. 

“Over time, it can also help identify waste, whether that is subscriptions that are no longer being used, payments that are incurring late fees or spend that is slipping through without enough visibility,” he said. 

Variance secures $21.5M 

Variance, an agentic AI platform for risk and compliance, secured $21.5 million in a series A round led by Ten Eleven Ventures, bringing its total funding to $26 million, according to a March 31 release.  

Variance plans to invest the money in the “infrastructure required for investigative agents” so they can gather evidence, test competing explanations, apply institutional policy and produce a recommendation with a clear audit trail, CEO Karine Mellata told FinAi News. 

The agent “needs to form the case, collect evidence, reason through conflicting facts, support action within defined permissions and generate an attributable narrative,” she said. 

Agentic AI’s potential to execute these steps is significant as fraud becomes more AI-native, Mellata said. 

“The framing is less that ‘AI solves fraud;’ it’s that investigative agents dramatically reduce the cost of high-quality investigations as attack sophistication scales,” she said. 

Spade raises $40M 

Spade, an AI platform that helps FIs and fintechs structure and maximize transaction data, announced a $40 million series B round led by Oak HC/FT, according to a March 24 release.  

Spade has raised $56.1 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Spade will use the money on expansion “beyond transaction enrichment to provide a full data and AI platform for payments intelligence,” CEO Oban MacTavish told FinAi News.  

The New York-based company uses agentic AI to “continuously scan the web and external data sources to fill metadata gaps and eliminate duplicate records,” he said. 

“This creates a flywheel where the system becomes more intelligent with every transaction processed, providing granular attributes such as precise geolocation and verified merchant categories not reliant on merchant category codes,” he said. 

Loyalty and rewards fintech Bilt is benefiting from Spade’s platform, MacTavish said, noting that Bilt’s program depends on accurately attributing transactions to specific merchants and locations. 

“Before automating that process, each misattributed transaction could trigger hours of customer service investigation and costly make-good payouts,” he said. 

Obin AI scores $7M 

Obin AI raised $7 million in seed funding led by Motive Partners, according to a March 18 release. 

Obin AI builds AI agents for financial institutions to “solve complex financial workflows end-to-end, learning edge cases systematically,” CEO Apoorv Saxena told FinAi News. 

The fintech also aims to address “capacity limits” that have caused many FIs to forego opportunities not because they weren’t profitable, “but because there wasn’t enough bandwidth to execute,” he said. 

One FI using Obin’s origination solution has seen a sevenfold increase in deals processed without adding headcount, he said, declining to add specifics.

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