Axyon AI, Italian start-up that brings deep learning to finance, today announced it has completed a Series A round of funding with UniCredit and ING Ventures, the venture capital arm of ING Bank. Individual investors also participated. The investment will be used to accelerate growth and further develop the product offering. It will also be used to support additional investment in research and development.

“We are extremely pleased to have the backing of these two leading financial institutions, each of which will bring immense value as we scale” says Daniele Grassi, CEO of Axyon. “Corporate and investment banks need to analyze large and complex sets of financial data to provide their clients with valuable advice. The data is often fragmented, and extracting value remains a painful manual process. We are excited to solve this problem through deploying our expertise in deep learning, an incredibly powerful branch of artificial intelligence (AI)”

One of Axyon’s core products is SynFinance, an AI-powered platform that identifies the investors who are most likely to participate in a syndicated loan. These insights help banks offer better advice to their clients whilst becoming more effective in the process. SynFinance is offered as a web-based application that delivers liquidity analysis and market insights directly to financial professionals.

Benoit Legrand, Chief Innovation Officer of ING and CEO of ING Ventures commented: “ING Ventures is constantly looking for fintechs that help us to deliver a differentiating experience for our clients. We invest in companies that are of strategic relevance for ING to accelerate its strategy. Axyon AI specifically is of interest because of their use cases in AI that can bring value to financial institutions, thanks to their predictive solutions. Additionally, Axyon AI has an ongoing partnership with the Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics team and the syndicated lending team is using Axyon’s SynFinance product to enhance their activities.”

Ranieri De Marchis, co-Chief Operating Officer at UniCredit, said: “In our view, fintechs can effectively generate ideas for banks, adding to the digital transformation already under way. We are strongly committed to developing innovative services and we are now proud to be investing in and partnering with Axyon AI in order to accelerate our digital transformation and further enhance the quality of our client advisory services. This perfectly fits with our strategy of collaborating with the most promising operators in the fintech space to explore, support and develop innovative solutions that can improve the experience of our corporate customers and meet their changing needs”

Axyon recently partnered with Refinitiv (Financial & Risk business of Thomson Reuters) to power the SynFinance platform. It has also partnerships with IBM and Nvidia.