Unique, a Swiss AI platform for finance, raises $30M | TechCrunch

A four-year-old Swiss startup has raised a sizable chunk of change to capitalize on the burgeoning “agentic AI” movement.

Unique said on Thursday that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round that was led by London-based VC firm DN Capital and CommerzVentures, the investment offshoot of Germany’s Commerzbank.

“Agentic AI” is among the biggest trends in technology right now, though there is no one definition of what an AI agent actually is. The core underlying concept is that an AI agent should be capable of much more than a simple chatbot, with the ability to make decisions and do a range of tasks — anything from doing your online shopping and filing expense reports to improving efficiency in factories.

Founded in Zurich in 2021 by CEO Manuel Grenacher, CCO Michelle Heppler, and CTO Andreas Hauri (pictured above), Unique wants to power an agentic AI workforce for financial services such as banking, insurance, and private equity.

This means automating workflows across areas such as research, compliance, and KYC (“know your customer”). Unique offers a bunch of customizable AI agents out-the-box, one of which is an investment research agent that draws on internal and external knowledge to provide answers to natural-language queries.

There’s also a due diligence agent, which analyzes documents such as meeting transcripts and compares them with past evaluations to suggest potential questions that bank personnel should ask.

The company was originally focused on AI-powered video for sales teams, but in the intervening years it evolved into something akin to a “co-pilot for finance teams.” And in 2023, Unique went live with Swiss private national bank Pictet, which Unique also counts as a strategic investor.

Unique also has other big-name Swiss financial institutions as customers, including UBP and Graubündner Kantonalbank.

With a fresh $30 million in the bank, Unique says it plans to accelerate its international expansion, with a particular focus on the U.S. market. The company has raised a total of $53 million to date.