This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Victoria Tostado Bringas, Co-founder and CEO of Cambridge-based fintech Agxes. Agxes is bringing artificial intelligence to agricultural lending, using it to help bridge the gap between bankers and farmers.
Victoria, tell us a bit about Agxes. What problems are you solving?
At Agxes, we are tackling the inefficiencies and system challenges in agricultural lending. Today, the process for farmers can take anywhere between 30-90 days. For farmers, we solve for a:
Very long lending process
Compliance hurdles
Little standardization
For lenders, we offer:
Operations optimization
New sources of income
What is your company’s origin story?
I have been a farmer for 7 years and have firsthand experience of the ag lending process and the difficulty of translating operational data to financials. Also, I have been and independent consultant for a development bank. Having the opportunity to work from both perspectives, I knew I wanted to solve this global problem.
I met Oscar Guardado, our CTO, at MIT. He is a national physics olympiad absolut gold medalist working in ag-tech, so the timing was right.
What is different about agronomic data?
Domain expertise is required to match it with finance risk models.
There are unique data sources, for example: water availability, soil quality, weather, market movements, satellite imagery, that give a more full picture of the biological process of farming – everything affects the potential future revenue of a farmer, and therefore more sophisticated risk models are needed.
Which Fintech Sandbox Data Partner have you worked with?
We have worked with Equifax, using their Sandbox to explore their credit data and integrating credit reports into the lending workflow, evaluating behavior for ag loan repayment models.
We’ve always had farmers. How can it be that agriculture lending has some of the highest operational costs among the US banking services?
The complexity of the process and the kind of data that is analyzed go beyond financials. There are more variables and more analysis required – doing this in a manual way makes costs high.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
We are supported; we walk along this incredible team that is always there to guide us and support our next phase.
What milestones has Agxes achieved so far?
Working with a customer in CA
Academic collaboration with Virginia Tech to enhance agriculture- finance ecosystem regionally
Main metrics – time reduction, improvement of credit quality
What’s next for Agxes?
Farmer’s wallet – financial infrastructure for capital deployment, improve models with more high quality data.
Keep growing in partnerships with banking and non-banking financial institutions across the US.
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To hear more about Agxes and five other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Daniele Azzaro, Co-founder and CEO of London-based fintech CleverChain. CleverChain is a next-generation regtech platform that transforms compliance with AI-driven, real-time, global due diligence and automated risk intelligence. It empowers financial institutions to onboard faster, stay fully compliant, and eliminate manual work with unparalleled speed, accuracy, and scale. CleverChain was ranked 2nd in BusinessCloud’s RegTech 50 for 2025.
Daniele Azzaro, Co-founder & CEO of CleverChain
Daniele, tell us a bit about CleverChain. What problems are you solving?
CleverChain is a next-generation regtech platform that transforms how financial institutions perform business due diligence and manage compliance.
Today, compliance teams struggle with fragmented data, manual workflows, slow onboarding, and rising regulatory pressure.
We solve this by delivering AI-driven, real-time global due diligence and automated risk intelligence in a single click. Our technology enables institutions to onboard customers faster, stay continuously compliant, and eliminate huge amounts of manual work without sacrificing accuracy or regulatory confidence.
What is your company’s origin story?
CleverChain was born out of first-hand experience. My co-founders and I spent years building and operating compliance functions inside global financial institutions, and we repeatedly saw the same pain points: disconnected data sources, expensive tools that don’t talk to each other, and analysts wasting time stitching together information. We realized compliance needed a fundamental redesign one that treats data as real-time, connected, and intelligent. That insight became CleverChain.
What problems do financial institutions encounter with compliance data?
The biggest issues are fragmentation, latency, and trust. Data comes from dozens of vendors, arrives in different formats, updates at different speeds, and often conflicts. Teams must manually reconcile everything, which slows onboarding, increases cost, and creates risk. On top of that, regulators increasingly expect continuous monitoring rather than point-in-time checks. Financial institutions need unified, real-time, and auditable intelligence—not static reports.
What were you able to do with the data from the Data Partners you worked with?
We worked with Equifax during our time in the Data Access Residency to access high-quality datasets that allowed us to test, validate, and refine our AI models across global corporate, ownership, and risk data. This access has been invaluable in accelerating product development and strengthening our data orchestration capabilities.
What makes CleverChain different from other AML or KYB solutions?
Most AML and KYB tools focus on running checks. CleverChain focuses on delivering intelligence. We don’t just aggregate data – we normalize, link, and reason over it using AI. Our platform creates a real-time risk graph of companies and people, continuously updating as new information emerges. This means faster onboarding, fewer false positives, and a much richer understanding of risk. We’re also infrastructure-agnostic, so we plug into existing stacks rather than forcing replacement.
EY is a Fintech Sandbox sponsor. What was it like participating in the EY FinTech Growth Programme?
Working with EY through the FinTech Growth Programme was extremely valuable. We gained direct exposure to senior industry experts, refined our go-to-market strategy, and pressure-tested our product positioning with real financial institutions. The programme helped accelerate commercial conversations and sharpen our enterprise readiness.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
It’s been an incredibly supportive and high-quality ecosystem. The community combines startups, data providers, and financial institutions in a way that’s genuinely collaborative. You get fast feedback, meaningful introductions, and access to resources that would normally take years to secure. It’s one of the most practical fintech communities we’ve been part of.
What milestones has CleverChain achieved so far?
We’ve earned the trust of major financial institutions and global enterprises, including top-tier banks and complex, highly regulated organizations across Europe. CleverChain has been recognized as Best KYB product by Chartis Research and ranked 2nd in BusinessCloud’s RegTech 50 for 2025.
More importantly, we’ve crossed a strategic threshold: moving beyond traditional AML and KYB tooling into a new category of autonomous, intelligence-led compliance. Customers are using CleverChain not just to run checks, but to fundamentally change how risk decisions are made—faster, continuously, and at enterprise scale.
What’s next for CleverChain?
We’re building toward a world where compliance operates itself. Our next phase is about delivering fully automated, continuously running risk control—where AI agents monitor, investigate, and resolve risk in real time across customers, counterparties, and transactions.
As we scale globally, CleverChain is evolving into the autonomous intelligence layer that sits at the heart of the financial system, giving institutions live, explainable control over risk at any moment. Not just faster compliance—but a fundamentally safer financial ecosystem.
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To hear more about CleverChain and five additional exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Charlie Ko, Co-founder and CEO of Boston-based fintech Gemsen. Gemsen is capable of processing massive amounts of data efficiently and securely, producing output that is accurate and in a usable form. Gemsen tames the data deluge using prediction models that require less compute and storage than other technologies.
Gemsen allows organizations to harness the power of machine learning without exposing sensitive data, ensuring complete compliance with data protection regulations. Whether applied within workflows such as insurtech, regtech, fraud detection, credit analytics, compliance, or investment research, Gemsen enables secure collaboration throughout the entire process.
Charlie Ko, Co-founder and CEO of Gemsen
Charlie, tell us a bit about Gemsen. What problems are you solving? What makes your approach different?
Most of today’s advanced technologies are extremely resource hungry. To perform at the speed of current data streams, they often require massive compute and storage in the form of GPU server farms. We took a completely different approach to use math to simplify the computations to what is essential. This not only preserves predictive performance, but also dramatically reduces the required resources by 99% or greater.
What is your company’s origin story?
We are driven by simplicity and elegance. For nearly two decades, our founding team has tackled complex and large-scale data problems by distilling information from noise. We have always understood that data is only useful if patterns can be detected quickly and reliably.
What does it mean to say that you capture the essential statistical structure of data in motion?
When deconstructing the AI/ML models, the functions of these ‘machines’ are distilled into essential equations. Even the most sophisticated models are defined by equations that perform the work of finding patterns. Many models can be simplified. Some models can be captured and interpreted through pre-computations that reflect the inter-relationships of the input data. These relationships can be described via higher and lower order statistical moments. The key is finding the sufficient set of statistics to produce a lossless rendition of the data for the relevant ML models in question.
This essential structure is the key to extremely fast ML training and inference. Additional important outcomes of this design are Gemsen’s adaptability to streaming data, in addition to interpretability and transparency of the models themselves.
Who is Gemsen’s target market?
We target financial institutions that deal with large-scale streaming data volumes each day. Sample institutions include banks, investment firms, brokers, payment processors, and insurance companies. Sample workflows include fraud detection, customer prediction, securities trading, and credit analytics.
Which Fintech Sandbox Data Partners have you worked with?
massive.com provides an extremely rich data set of market flow information spanning many years. Since data is the fuel that powers AI/ML, their clean and reliable data made testing easier for Gemsen. Billions of rows of data flowing at millisecond speed helped us prove our reliability and improve our capabilities.
What milestones has Gemsen achieved so far?
Our software is already enterprise scale and has been deployed in Fortune 100 companies outside finance. There, we have demonstrated substantial increase in efficiency and reliability of the technology. Gemsen was founded to bring this technology to finance and is in active testing within the finance domain.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
It’s been an amazing experience. The people in this community have been extremely giving of their time and expertise. The best part is everyone’s approachability. Coupled with their willingness to share their experience and ideas, this makes a powerful combination.
You also took part in the MassChallenge Fintech Program last year. What was that like?
It was great from the start. The number of conversations and connections from day 1 was extremely important for us to gain quick momentum. I can’t overstate how helpful the entire ecosystem has been for Gemsen. In fact, the connections brought us include two key advisors. Both helped gain resources that are critical in our ongoing work. This is on-top of getting an inside track to Fintech Week and other high-profile events throughout the year, which nets more ideas and connections.
What’s next for Gemsen?
Just spreading the word – that you can tame the data deluge while still being reliable, accurate and efficient.
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To hear more about Gemsen and five additional exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!
Last week, at our 11th Demo Day, we saw five fintech innovators succinctly showcase their solutions to the most pressing challenges in financial services. The companies they founded built these solutions during their recent participation in our Data Access Residency with the support of several of our Data Partners.
The presentations were fast paced, and some of you may have missed the interactions between founders and members of the audience. So, here are a few of the questions audience members asked after seeing what these teams have built, and the answers these founders provided.
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Sandbox Wealth has built a turnkey open banking solution for wealth managers, including independent advisors and family offices, allowing them to offer sophisticated cash management and credit products to their clients. Ray Denis, the Founder and CEO, provided the product demonstration to the hundreds of people who tuned in for Demo Day.
JS: How are you thinking about Agentic AI?
Ray Denis: We’re looking closely at agentic workflows for document ingestion and yield optimization (for both assets and liabilities). Very focused on getting the data layer right before we dive into those features, but it’s a major part of the roadmap.
BC: How are high-net-worth clients onboarded (one at a time or through datasets)?
Ray Denis: We can handle onboarding one at a time or by mass onboarding with an integration to a firm or advisor’s CRM. We let our partners decide how they’d like to address.
BC: Also, how long to integrate for Registered Investment Advisors?
Ray Denis: The process is intended to be quick. After contracting, we can handle the one at a time onboarding almost immediately. I’d budget 60-90 days for mass onboarding to ensure connectivity with the CRM and the accuracy of the data.
Serene is transforming customer care in financial services by helping banks and financial organizations proactively identify, predict, and support customers in vulnerable circumstances. Savannah Price, Serene’s Founder and CEO, provided our Demo Day audience with a demonstration of the capabilities this London-headquartered fintech built while taking part in our Data Access Residency.
SD: What data and systems do you need access to?
Savannah Price: Open banking/ transactional data (current, credit card, savings accounts). Interaction data, voice-to-text (for sentiment analysis).
JB: Who is the end user of Serene? Which business unit of the customer would be the purchaser of this product?
Savannah Price: End user is the financial institution – Heads of Credit Risk, Heads of Collections, Customer Ops. Exploring scam susceptibility use cases at the moment with Fraud/Fincrime teams.
7Analytics has developed AI-driven flood risk modeling for insurers and asset owners, leveraging high-resolution datasets and 600+ physical parameters. 7Analytics can provide crucial information of flood risk, all the way down to the building level. Helge Jørgensen is Co-founder and CEO of 7Analytics, the first insurtech founded in Norway to present at Demo Day.
WC: What is your geographical coverage? Do you have data for commercial and industrial sites? What is the time horizon for your simulations? Which long-term scenarios do you use?
Helge Jørgensen: Yes – we cover commercial sites. We have several industrial customers in the US today that use our technology. Geographical coverage is based on where we see traction. Our technology is scalable, so we are ready to enter new markets.
EM: Are you also considering to expand to the UK?
Helge Jørgensen: We have our technology ready for the UK. We are running several POC in the UK now.
RK: How are your models/products different than First Street?
Helge Jørgensen: Our approach is different in how we are approaching the modeling of flooding. We use high resolution models (3x3ft), high resolution landuse cover, and ML on claims from insurance companies. We provide flood risk covering all flood types – urban, fluvial and storm surge. We also keep our input data up-to-date by using advanced tech for updating/enhancing the terrain and land use data.
Calculum is offering an AI-powered supply chain analytics platform that helps companies unlock working capital, improve supplier intelligence, and generate free cash flow by optimizing payment terms. Co-founder Eric Zager presented Calculum’s capabilities to our Demo Day audience.
JS: Can Calculum help corporates address disruptions in their supply chains caused by tariffs?
Eric Zager: Yes—by leveraging data and benchmarking, Calculum helps corporates negotiate improved payment terms and optimize working capital, providing flexibility to mitigate the impact of tariffs and other cost pressures.
TM: Any intention of supporting your customers on their receivables side, as well?
Eric Zager: Absolutely. While our core focus has been on payables, we’re seeing strong demand on the receivables side and plan to support clients in optimizing their entire working capital cycle.
BL: What are your thoughts about addressing opportunities in supply chain finance yourselves?
Eric Zager: We believe there’s significant potential in integrating supply chain finance capabilities into our platform. While we currently partner with leading providers, we’re actively exploring how we can offer direct solutions to better serve our clients.
Level2 offers the first fully visual no-code systematic trading strategy creation platform built for active traders. Andrew Grevett, Co-founder and CEO, provided a demonstration of the company’s product and an explanation of their B2B2C model. Level2 is making data-driven trading simple and accessible for all.
CS: Does the platform offer any type of education? I understand it enables a lot of resources for traders, but UI seems to assume the user already has a lot of knowledge around trading, and understanding trades.
Andrew Grevett: Yes, education is a key part of our strategy as the visual approach makes learning and understanding simple. It’s something we intend to enhance in the next version, moving more towards a more dynamic approach along with an immersive trading mode.
LZ: Does this include direct feeds (rather than the consolidated SIP tape)?
Andrew Grevett: We do not have any direct feeds at the moment; it’s all from the SIP tape.
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If you’d like to talk to any of these entrepreneurs about what they are building, please reach out to us here. If you weren’t able to attend Demo Day 11, we’ll be posting a recording showcasing the presentations of these five outstanding startups, as well as insights from thought leaders representing the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, MassMutual, and KKR, to our YouTube channel shortly.
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Helge Jørgensen, Co-founder and CEO of Norwegian fintech 7Analytics. 7Analytics develops highly precise predictive models for flood risk for insurers and asset owners.
Helge Joergensen, Co-Founder & CEO of 7Analytics
Helge, tell us a bit about 7Analytics. What problems are you solving?
Floods are frequent and expensive. And this keeps growing. Without much better data people cannot insure their homes and businesses keep their operations going. We provide that data at a much greater granularity.
Why is granularity in flood prediction important and how do you achieve it?
Insurers need to understand flood risk in-depth – property by property. Water moves along the landscape and even a few inches of height difference here or a green spot there makes a huge difference for flood risk. Only the best data tells you the difference in risk from one side of the street to the other.
What is your company’s origin story?
Our founder team built their skills in the offshore oil and gas sector which remains one of the most knowledge intensive industries in one of the toughest environments on Earth. From here a drive to learn and apply the best possible data tool to produce the best possible solutions has led us to flood risk and to breaking away from traditional approaches.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
7Analytics has moved in two dimensions recently and Fintech Sandbox has been an important partner in both consolidating our services to the financial industry and establishing our US organization.
Why is data access important to your startup?
Data is all we do. Much geodata is open source, but we have only made it this far by building partnerships with leading industry players around data access.
What milestones has 7Analytics achieved so far?
Being live on four continents is a major thing that I am super proud of – this includes my own relocation from Europe to Boston and setting up shop here.
What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
Climate innovation has for a long time been very focused on getting emissions down. For good reasons. Now, adaptation is growing in importance and this basically is a matter of risk. Climate risk. And here fintechs play a key part in getting the banks and insurers up to speed.
How does 7Analytics think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
AI and Machine Learning is driving a paradigm shift in water risk modelling. The focus is going in a direction of high-quality, rich input data and really understanding patterns and building predictive power. But: many – also insurers – remain anchored in traditional models.
What’s next for 7Analytics?
Kicking in doors to more insurance companies that are realizing that they need much better data to handle the increasing flood risk.
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To hear more about 7Analytics and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Eric Zager, co-Founder of Miami-based Calculum, which is offering an AI-powered supply chain analytics platform that helps companies unlock working capital, improve supplier intelligence, and generate free cash flow.
Eric, tell us a bit about Calculum. What problems are you solving?
Calculum is a negotiation intelligence tool that enables corporates to gain a competitive advantage by using advanced analytics and AI to improve payment terms and gather more insights into suppliers. The platform optimizes payment terms with both suppliers and customers – unlocking working capital. The tool also assess suppliers’ ESG, estimated financing costs, credit ratings, negotiation leverage, price vs terms calculator, along with many other tools that benefit corporate treasury & procurement operations.
What is ADA, and how did it get its name?
ADA is the payment terms platform Calculum has built. It gets its name from Ada Lovelace who is considered the world’s first computer programmer.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
It’s been great to have the support of the Fintech Sandbox and have access to test data from many great companies and sources
Why is data access important to your startup?
Data can be expensive and Calculum requires corporate data in order to provide accurate suggestions to our clients.
What is your company’s origin story?
Calculum was founded in 2020 as a way to benchmark payment terms with suppliers and ensure our client’s suppliers are being offered the correct payment term and to help companies not indirectly finance their competition.
Working Capital Innovation Award – Working Capital Forum (Amsterdam – 2022)
Procurecon EU Dragons Den Winner – Procurecon (Barcelona – 2024)
MassChallenge Finalist – (Boston 2024)
Finalist Treasury Innovation Award – TMANY Cash Exchange (New York City – 2024)
Supply Chain Finance Innovation Award – Supply Chain Finance Community (Zurich – 2024)
What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
The growing popularity of supply chain finance (Reverse-factoring).
What is the Miami fintech scene like?
Miami’s fintech scene and the overall startup community have grown tremendously since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Many startups began during this period or moved from states like California and New York to the Miami area due to fewer restrictions and a more business-friendly environment.
What’s next for Calculum?
We will be growing our partnerships as well as further developing our solution, in 2025 we will be flipping the model of the tool to also support companies on their receivables side with customers as well.
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To hear more about Calculum and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Savannah Price, Co-founder and CEO of London-headquartered fintech Serene. Serene is transforming customer care in financial services by helping banks and financial organizations proactively identify, predict, and support customers in vulnerable circumstances.
Savannah, tell us a bit about Serene. What problems are you solving?
Serene is an AI-driven platform tackling one of the biggest blind spots in financial services — how to identify and support vulnerable customers before they fall into financial distress. The need for this has never been greater. Two-thirds of UK adults show characteristics of vulnerability, whether due to life events, emotional distress, or financial hardship. These customers are 7 times more likely to experience problem debt, scams, and financial exclusion, yet fewer than 10% are detected by firms today. Right now, most institutions rely on reactive methods, stepping in only after a missed payment or a collections call. But by then, it’s often too late.
We use AI-driven behavioural analysis to detect early signals of vulnerability — whether it’s due to a life event, emotional distress, or financial instability. This allows firms to act proactively with tailored interventions, reducing bad debt, improving retention, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
For businesses, vulnerability management isn’t just a compliance requirement — it’s a commercial opportunity. Done right, it leads to stronger customer relationships, reduced losses, and better financial outcomes for everyone.
How does Serene leverage behavioral science?
Financial vulnerability doesn’t appear out of nowhere — it builds up over time, often reflected in subtle changes in behaviour. At Serene, we apply behavioural science principles to transactional data to detect these shifts before they escalate into financial distress.
For example, a customer going through a bereavement, mental health struggles, or job loss might not immediately default on payments, but their transaction patterns, spending habits, or engagement with financial services may change. By analysing real-world behavioural data, we can detect these early warning signs and provide actionable insights for institutions to intervene in a way that’s both personalised and ethical.
Our approach ensures that support isn’t just available — it’s timely, relevant, and effective.
What is your company’s origin story?
My journey to founding Serene was deeply personal. Growing up, I saw how my siblings’ struggles with poor mental health showed up in their financial behaviour — missed payments, erratic spending, sudden withdrawals. These were subtle signals that something was wrong, but no one was connecting the dots.
That was my aha moment. Vulnerability isn’t just about financial hardship — it’s about life events, emotional distress, and health challenges that impact financial well-being. Yet, businesses were still using outdated, reactive methods to support customers — leaving millions of potentially vulnerable customers both unidentified and underserved.
I founded Serene to change that. By combining AI, behavioural science, and transactional data analysis we help institutions identify vulnerability early, so they can act before customers reach crisis point — protecting both people and businesses.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
Being part of the Fintech Sandbox community has been an absolute game-changer for Serene. One of the biggest barriers to innovation in financial services is access to high-quality data, and the Fintech Sandbox has helped us overcome that challenge.
It’s also been invaluable to be surrounded by like-minded innovators solving complex financial problems. The ecosystem provides not just data access but also mentorship, networking, and industry collaboration — all of which have helped us accelerate our growth and refine our product offering.
Why is data access important to your startup?
For AI-driven fintech solutions, data is everything. Without access to real-world financial data, it’s impossible to build models that accurately detect early signals of vulnerability.
Traditional financial data — like credit scores — only tells part of the story. To truly understand vulnerability, we need transactional behaviour, spending patterns, and interaction metrics. But many startups struggle to get access to this kind of data.
That’s why initiatives like Fintech Sandbox are so important. By providing access to high-quality datasets, they help companies like Serene train, test, and refine AI models in a way that ensures accuracy, fairness, and real-world applicability.
What milestones has Serene achieved so far?
We’ve moved fast — validating our product, securing major customers, and building a strong pipeline. In just a few months, we’ve gone from regulatory validation to commercial traction, with a clear path to scaling across the industry.
A major milestone was securing FCA Sandbox approval, allowing us to test our technology in a real-world, regulated environment — a huge credibility boost when working with financial institutions. We’ve also been selected for key industry innovation labs like FinTech Innovation Lab London and TSB Labs, which has accelerated adoption and opened doors to new partnerships.
The market response has been incredible. We’ve built a £45M pipeline, with 70% of leads coming inbound, proving the strength of demand. We’ve secured 2x commercial deals and we’ve secured investment from a tier 1 UK bank, further validating the urgent need for our solutions.
Beyond direct sales, we’re unlocking growth through strategic partnerships, which now give us direct access to 85+ financial institutions. We’ll be announcing more details soon, but this marks a significant step toward embedding Serene into the broader financial ecosystem.
What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
There are a few major shifts happening in fintech that I find really exciting:
The rise of AI-native financial services. AI is no longer just a tool — it’s becoming central to decision-making across lending, risk management, and customer support.
Embedded finance & proactive financial wellness. Financial institutions are shifting from being transactional to becoming proactive partners in customer well-being.
Regulatory innovation. With regulations like the FCA’s Consumer Duty, firms are now being held accountable for delivering better customer outcomes — and fintech is playing a huge role in enabling that.
All of these trends reinforce the need for smarter, more ethical AI-driven solutions — which is exactly where Serene fits in.
How does Serene think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
Serene is AI-native, meaning AI is embedded in both our product suite and internal operations, allowing us to continuously refine our models and improve customer outcomes. Unlike traditional approaches which rely on static vulnerability indicators of vulnerability or manual self-disclosures, which are often backward-looking, our approach is designed to predict vulnerability before financial distress escalates.
We use a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning to detect both known patterns of vulnerability and emerging risks that traditional models miss. Our machine learning-powered behavioural insights go beyond static affordability checks, analysing real-time transactional and behavioural data to flag early warning signs. We also leverage conversational AI to enhance — not replace — human decision-making, equipping agents with real-time insights so they can provide personalised, proactive support at scale.
Beyond our product, AI plays a critical role in how we develop, test, and optimise our models. We use automation to continuously refine our algorithms, ensuring they remain accurate, ethical, and aligned with evolving regulations. For us, AI isn’t just about automation — it’s about fundamentally transforming how businesses identify and support vulnerable customers in a scalable, responsible way.
What’s next for Serene?
We’re laser-focused on scaling our impact. Some of our next big moves include:
Expanding our partnerships with financial institutions, insurers, and telcos.
Enhancing our AI models with additional behavioural datasets.
Launching new self-service integrations to make adoption frictionless.
Expanding into international markets, starting with Europe.
Our mission is to make proactive, ethical vulnerability management the industry standard — and we’re just getting started.
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To hear more about Serene and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Andrew Grevett, Co-founder and CEO of London-based Level2, a fully visual, no-code, systematic trading strategy creation platform built for active traders.
Andrew, tell us a bit about Level2. What problems are you solving and what makes your solution unique?
By making systematic trading simple and accessible, we’re helping traders take advantage of automation without the steep learning curve. What sets Level2 apart is that it’s the only fully visual solution out there. We’ve transformed traditional technical analysis and automated trading into something intuitive, so anyone—regardless of coding expertise or technical experience—can confidently use it to enhance their trading.
What is your company’s origin story?
Level2 started from a personal realisation that there was a significant gap in the tools available to retail traders. After years of experience as a trader and also working with technology, I noticed a clear divide between the sophisticated tools used by institutional traders and what was available to everyday retail traders. The goal behind Level2 was to bridge the gap between analysis and execution, making these same powerful tools intuitive, accessible, and empowering for everyone. I wanted to create a platform that would help people feel confident using automation, fundamentally changing how people trade financial markets in future.
How significant is the active trader market?
In recent years, the retail trading market has experienced substantial growth. A big driver behind this surge has been the rise of online broker platforms that have made trading more accessible to a younger, tech-savvy generation. With the growing popularity of these platforms and increased community-driven social trading, the active trader market is only expected to expand further.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
It’s given us access to a network of like-minded innovators and industry experts, all focused on pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in fintech. The data resources and support provided through Fintech Sandbox have been invaluable in helping us refine the MVP, get product market fit and scale.
Why is data access important to your startup?
Accurate and timely data is the foundation of any trading strategy, and so it’s essential for us to deliver this to our users so they can take full advantage of our platform’s capabilities. With high-quality, real-time data, we ensure that traders can make informed decisions quickly and confidently.
What milestones has Level2 achieved so far?
The initial version of our trading application is live, and we’ve already signed contracts and started work on prototype testing with our first three partners in the USA and APAC.
What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
The rise of the active trader is a major trend reshaping the retail trading landscape, and it’s one we’re particularly excited about. As more traders move towards short-term, data-driven trading, the demand for advanced tools and automation grows. This trend will have a significant impact on the way brokers engage with their audience and it will create huge opportunities for innovation and growth in the retail trading space.
How does Level2 think about latency?
Our infrastructure is designed to optimise speed, ensuring that traders can act quickly on market opportunities, automating their trades and managing their risks in almost real-time. By focusing on low-latency solutions, we help traders stay ahead in a competitive and fast paced environment.
You’ve participated in both Y Combinator and Techstars. Can you compare and contrast?
Both programs contributed to our growth but in different ways—YC education taught us to scale quickly, while Techstars helped us focus on the details and build a solid foundation, with practical, day-to-day guidance that helped us refine our operations and strategy.
What’s next for Level2?
The next step for Level2 is to continue innovating and refining our platform to meet the growing demand for intuitive, automated trading solutions. I think as today’s traders become much more tech-savvy and community-driven, Level2 is perfectly positioned to empower a new emerging generation. We’re focused on delivering even more advanced automation features centered around our visual theme, enhancing the end-to-end user experience, and building deeper connections within trading communities to support smarter, more efficient technical trading.
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To hear more about Level2 and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!
This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Ray Denis, Founder & CEO of New York-based Sandbox Wealth, a financial technology startup with a turnkey platform that allows independent advisors and family offices to offer sophisticated cash management and credit products to their clients.
Ray, tell us a bit about your Sandbox Wealth. What problems are you solving?
Sandbox Wealth is an open finance platform for wealth managers. Through our network of banking partners, we provide independent advisory firms, including RIAs, Family Offices, Trust Companies, and Insurance Carriers, with sophisticated cash management and credit solutions for their clients.
We solve for a broad array of issues. For example, rather than selling assets to make tax payments or moving assets to lenders to support reduced mortgage rates, we build the rails that connect client data from custodians and end clients themselves to streamline the process of accessing these solutions while helping advisors build deeper relationships.
Many people will think that high-net-worth individuals don’t need help managing liquidity since, by definition, they have a lot of money. How are they using the liquidity they can access through your platform?
First, we should highlight the difference between assets and liquidity. I’ve worked with thousands of clients over my career, and every balance sheet is different because every client has made their wealth differently. Many clients are entrepreneurs who have substantial wealth in a closely held business or have invested heavily in private equity. Generally speaking, these assets aren’t liquid and can’t be used to make opportunistic investments or to purchase real estate.
This is where access to liquidity becomes critical. Using our platform to compile balance sheet and cash flow data, we can dramatically reduce the timeline for accessing credit because lenders rely on having clean and deep information on borrowers and collateral. Further, clients can remain invested and maintain a strategic view of how they manage their portfolios.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
Being part of the Fintech Sandbox community has far exceeded my expectations. As part of the Data Access Residency, we’ve been able to work with teams like Morningstar, Plaid, SQX, and others to source critical data for our platform, but the community has contributed far more than just data. We’ve been able to connect with other founders to trade notes on prospective investors, accelerator programs, and recruiting. I definitely underestimated the value of being part of a network of founders building solutions in adjacent verticals.
Why is data access important to your startup?
Our mission is to enable the free flow of data and capital. By building a standardized workflow for sharing complex data sets between financial institutions and clients, we eliminate data asymmetries between parties while reducing friction in providing (and accessing) liquidity.
What is your company’s origin story?
I’ve been working with wealthy clients for nearly two decades to deliver custom liquidity solutions while serving at major financial institutions. Throughout my career, I’ve originated many billions of dollars of debt, and virtually every transaction required some degree of manual effort to parse out balance sheet and cash flow details from an unstructured data set, which can be as painful for clients as it is for lenders.
Using the latest tools available, including multimodal LLMs, open banking, and real-time payments, we suddenly had a product opportunity to eliminate several manual, time-consuming, and expensive processes. Ultimately, the solution was to effectively build a capital-efficient and open-architecture private banking platform that serves clients, advisors, and lenders. When paired with the market opportunity as more investment advisors started leaving private banks and wirehouses to join or form independent firms, I found myself with a compelling concept for a venture-scale business.
What milestones has Sandbox Wealth achieved thus far?
We’ve raised our pre-seed round led by NextGen Venture Partners, which included participation from Northwestern Mutual. We also have a really beautiful MVP that will serve as a rock-solid foundation for many of the exciting products we’re rolling out this year. These accomplishments have led to substantial business development opportunities, including lending relationships with Tier 1 lenders as well as design partnerships with enterprise firms like MassMutual and Halo Investing.
How does Sandbox Wealth view open banking?
People often view open banking as a way to aggregate data from financial institutions, which is true, but there’s far more to it than that. We look at open banking as a way to decouple banking software from banks, which enables more seamless access to data across financial institutions. This creates an ability to extract and share complex financial data securely, which, when paired with real-time payments, effectively means you can develop one fully operational banking platform that can plug into multiple banks and brokers.
Once you have unlocked this data, you no longer have to rely on manual processes to calculate cash flows, liquidity, net worth, or leverage, which will drive more efficient underwriting processes, spending decisions, and planning advice across lenders, clients, and advisors, respectively.
What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
It’s hard not to be excited about fintech’s trajectory when you look at the progress in open banking, real-time payments, and AI. Having access to one innovative and foundational technology to build a firm like ours would be abnormal at any point in history, but we now have access to three that are all on par with things like the magnetic strip and the ATM.
How does Sandbox Wealth think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
Agentic workflows that can sweep funds to cover shortfalls or optimize yield across your bank accounts can be initiated via text or voice inputs instead of complex manual processes.
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To hear more about Sandbox Wealth and 4 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 11!
This year, FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] will take place across two days, April 9 & April 11. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Today, we’re talking to Maya Urman Bahar, Co-Founder & CEO of Tel Aviv based Proov.ai. Bridging the gap between data science and compliance teams, Proov.ai disrupts fintech regulation with automated model validation, revolutionizing Model Risk Management for banks. Proov.ai is presenting on Thursday, April 11.
Q. Maya, tell us a bit about Proov.ai. What problems are you solving?
A. All Models in financial institutions need to be governed to meet regulations. The approval process is lengthy, costly, manual and unorganized. FinTech Data Science teams are forced to constrain and compromise the accuracy of the models to meet regulatory review requirements.
Q. What is your company’s origin story?
A. Einat and I, having worked together at a fintech company, encountered the widespread challenge of a lengthy and costly model approval process, which not only compromised the accuracy of our models but also directly impacted the company’s bottom line. Recognizing the inefficiency and unsustainability of the current approach in the era of AI, we were inspired to set out on a mission to revolutionize Model Risk Management (MRM).
Q. Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
A. It is amazing to be part of such a group of accomplished people!
Q. Why is data access important to your startup?
A. Data access is essential to our startup as it allows us to create synthetic data using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). We require access to diverse types of data, including bureau, transactional, and demographic data, to generate synthetic datasets that accurately represent real-world scenarios. Synthetic data is crucial for maintaining security, ensuring privacy, and simulating extreme conditions without risking sensitive information. This approach enables us to train our models effectively and develop robust solutions for model validation.
Q. What milestones has Proov.ai achieved so far?
A. We developed our first phase of the product. Are working on a POC with a BAAS provider.
Q. What trends in fintech are you most excited about?
A. Gen-AI and LLMs.
Q. How does Proov.ai think about leveraging AI in a differentiated way?
A. Our company takes a differentiated approach to leveraging AI by focusing on the core use of AI technology in our platform:
1. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN): We utilize GANs to generate synthetic data, creating diverse datasets that closely represent real-world data. This synthetic data forms the foundation for testing against various protected features, ensuring the robustness and fairness of our models.
2. Comprehensive Training Data: We train our models on comprehensive datasets, including bureau, transactional, and demographic data. This enables us to develop more accurate and reliable models.
3. Deep Learning: We employ deep learning techniques to conduct stress tests and fairness assessments at a very deep level. This allows us to evaluate the resilience and equity of our models under various scenarios, ensuring their reliability.
4. Large Language Models (LLMs): Our platform leverages LLMs to generate insightful documentation. This streamlines the communication and decision-making processes.
Q. What’s next for Proov.ai?
A. As our technology continues to evolve, with a current focus on Gen-AI-based documentation, our primary goal is to gain traction by broadening our reach and onboarding additional banks and fintech partners. We are also exploring new ways to enhance our platform’s capabilities and deliver even more value to our clients.
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To hear more about Proov.ai and 11 other exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for FinTech Sandbox Demo Day[s] 10!
![Meet Proov.ai — A Demo Day[s] 10 Presenting Startup](https://www.fintechsandbox.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Proov_Blog_Founder_Header.png)
