Fintech funding remains robust, sovereign wealth funds pull back

Despite economic uncertainty and low liquidity in certain sectors of the economy, fintech funding has been relatively robust as several AI providers secured money this month. Early-stage rounds continue to attract capital, with investors still willing to back strong teams and large addressable markets, even in the absence of hard financial metrics, Anthony Georgiades , co-founder of venture and private funds company Innovating Capital , told FinAi News . At early stages, "investors continue to underwrite teams and markets more than the financial metrics of the company," he said. However, the picture deteriorates sharply at the growth stage, he said. Series A and B rounds have become significantly more difficult to close, with investors demanding clear evidence of product-market fit and durable revenue before committing capital, Georgiades said. Fintechs raised $227 billion globally in the second quarter, up 78% year over year, but late-stage VC rounds fell 24.5% YoY to 2,443 deals, according to a KPMG “Q2 '26 Venture Pulse Report - Global” trends report published this month. AI has emerged as the key variable in how investors allocate capital across fintech and enterprise tech, but Georgiades struck a cautious tone on how that premium is being applied. "We try to not necessarily change the valuation mindset just because something is applying AI or it's not," he said. The companies that earn a higher valuation, he argued, have genuine data moats — firms with "really high access to unique data sets that compound over time" and improve model performance — rather than businesses that have layered an LLM onto an existing product and rebranded accordingly. Outlook While fintech funding logged a strong quarter, headwinds might show delayed impact on the sector in the second half, Georgiades said. Sovereign wealth funds and large institutional investors, once reliable sources of capital for the venture ecosystem, have reduced their exposure, he said. Many have cut their venture allocation by 50% to 75%, even as their overall capital bases have grown, he said. Georgiades also said many of the series B extension rounds and inside-led financings circulating in the market are effectively emergency bridges in disguise. "You're seeing a lot of these series B extension rounds, these quasi inside-led rounds, but those are more akin to some of these sort of emergency type or bridge type rounds that you would have historically, and they're being masked as these other things," he said. Lumin Digital gets $115M Digital banking platform Lumin Digital raised $115 million across two rounds, with investors including Light Street Capital and bank customers, according to a July 15 release. The money will help Lumin Digital accelerate AI deployment and platform expansions in a secure, reliable way, Chief Executive Jeff Chambers told FinAi News . The fintech's cloud-native architecture enables AI to "work across the platform rather than being confined to individual products or isolated use cases," Chambers said. The most significant opportunity for AI in digital banking is to "build intelligence into a cloud-native platform where data, products and experiences can work together," he added. "What comes next is straightforward: We keep building," he said. Feathery lands $30M Feathery , an AI decisioning platform that automates workflows such as data intake and document processing, secured $30 million in a series A round led by Portage Ventures , according to a July 14 release. The money will accelerate Feathery’s vision of “AI becoming the operating layer for financial services,” CEO Peter Dun told FinAi News . “We'll continue investing in the core capabilities that allow AI to understand documents, make decisions, orchestrate work across systems and surface operational insights from the data flowing through those processes,” he said. Feathery also plans to advance Robin, its workflow assistant for wealth management and insurance, and strengthen integration processes so “institutions can deploy AI without replacing the core systems they already depend on,” Dun said. The fintech is focused on providing the infrastructure to execute workflows end-to-end, “from understanding documents to making decisions, generating paperwork, coordinating approvals and integrating with core systems,” he said. The platform also helps “identify bottlenecks, uncover operational trends and surface insights that help improve decision-making and continuously optimize their processes,” he said. KredosAI raises $7M AI-powered collections platform KredosAI raised $7 million in a series A round led by BMW i Ventures , according to a July 2 release. One of KredosAI’s objectives is to “work on traditional AI approaches such as multi-armed bandit, as well as some of the newer advances in agentic AI workflows,” CEO Balaji Sridharan told FinAi News . Multi-armed bandit refers to testing thousands of message variants across channels such as text, email and WhatsApp to determine the best form of communication for a given user The funding round reflects growing demand for delinquency-prevention and collections solutions, Sridharan said. “This problem of communications is inherently multidimensional and is well suited for AI to address at scale,” he said. “We use a combination of traditional machine learning algorithms and some of the newer agentic AI approaches to help solve this problem.” In addition, the fintech is “introducing voice agents as a part of our capability,” Sridharan said. “Historically, we have focused on digital channels, but … we have already started introducing agentic voice capabilities into our product,” he said. Encore AI nabs $30M Encore AI raised $30 million in a series A round led by Team8 and rebranded from Insait IO , the fintech announced on July 29. Encore AI builds AI agents for customer-facing processes such as sales and support by analyzing interactions among top human performers and then training the agents on that data. The funding will support Encore's go-to-market strategy, stressing to financial institutions that its agents are revenue-generating solutions that can increase "conversion rates, collection rates and deflection rates," CEO Dvir Ginzburg told FinAi News . "The first and foremost goal for us in the next six months, from an educational piece and a marketing piece, is for every banker to know that AI is more than just an efficiency play," he said. "The second piece is that because we have built that extremely unique recommendation engine for conversational interactions, as we connect to more core banking systems and CRMs, the agent itself becomes smarter," he said. Register here for the FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas. This inaugural event will include speakers from Fifth Third and Capital One as well as a fireside chat with Piermont Bank founder and Chief Executive Wendy Cai-Lee .

Fintech funding remains robust, sovereign wealth funds pull back

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Fintech funding remains robust, sovereign wealth funds pull back

Lumin Digital, Feathery, KredosAI, Encore AI raised funds this month

Dollar Bank’s VP of AI innovation takes AI-driven leadership course by MIT

AI skills more valuable than MBAs, 86% of finance executives say

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