Freyda, the award-winning Fintech startup, announced they have raised £625,000 led by Innovate UK. A number of Angel investors also took part including: Dan Cobley (ex-head of Google UK, co-founder of Clearscore and SalaryFinance), Julian Skan (Senior MD at Accenture, investor in Fintech) and Community Growth Ventures (investors in Afrocenchix and diverse founders).
The UK headquartered company helps pension funds, university endowments, insurers and asset managers who currently spend an estimated $3.3 billion annually on manual data processing from documents. Freyda automatically extracts, normalizes and exports data from highly complex documents using deep learning to help their customers focus on high-value, high-impact work.
Fintech and AI have caused huge disruption to the way in which we access our finances and interact with financial products, yet many of the institutions that underpin them have been slow to adopt new solutions across their own businesses, particularly within asset management. This was the gap and opportunity spotted by Freyda’s founder and CEO, Danielle Lawrence, a former Analyst at Goldman Sachs. Danielle experienced these pain points first hand and would often find herself manually slogging through thousands of complex financial documents into the early hours to inform important investment decisions. Inspired by breakthroughs in technology, she wanted to help others free their time and data and avoid human error.
Freyda’s technology leverages deep learning to achieve best-in-class accuracy with very little data and training time. The result is 10x improvement in speed and a reduction in operating costs of a third. Freyda’s CTO, James Moore explains “The Freyda platform really is game-changing, until now clients relied on rules-based technology which required manual templating or AI tools that required months of training, we are disrupting that to enable organisations to implement and scale quickly. We are thrilled to have the support of Innovate UK and highly experienced Angels”.
Accelerated by Covid-19, the industry is now moving fast to play catch up and the Freyda team, who have previously held positions at Metlife, Thompson Reuters, Equiniti and Accenture, are ready to help digitise the industry. Earlier this year, the Freyda team were selected as winners of the ISG Startup Challenge 2020 and have been awarded one of the largest grants aimed at digitising the asset management industry from InnovateUK, the UK’s innovation agency.
Speaking about the solution, Freyda’s CEO, Danielle Lawrence said “We are thrilled to have achieved so much in 2020 despite the challenging environment. With the help of Freyda’s technology, our clients can finally unlock the full potential of their data to drive better decision-making and ultimately increase returns. This funding will help us to expand the team, fine tune our platform and support customer growth”.
Innovate UK Executive Chair Dr Ian Campbell said: “In these difficult times we have seen the best of British business innovation. The pandemic is not just a health emergency but one that impacts society and the economy. Freyda, along with every initiative Innovate UK has supported, is an important step forward in driving sustainable economic development. Each one is also helping to realise the ambitions of hard-working people.”
About Freyda
Freyda is a UK based Fintech founded by a team of financial professionals, technologists and PhDs. The Freyda platform leverages deep learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to help organisations and their workers free up time and resources for high-value, high-impact work and improved decision-making. For more info, visit www.freyda.io
