London fintech Quartz raises £2,75m to put an AI banker in your pocket
The pre-seed round is small by global standards, but it points at the part of finance where South African startups are already building.
A London fintech called Quartz has raised £2,75 million in pre-seed funding to launch an artificial intelligence personal finance assistant in the United Kingdom. As Ventureburn reported on 16 September, the round was led by Daphni, with Outward VC, K Fund, Kantox founder Philippe Gelis and former N26 and Kraken chief product officer Gilles BianRosa taking part.
The company was founded in 2025 by André Silva, formerly head of global expansion at Revolut, and Mateus Mesquita Alves, formerly an investment product lead at N26. It runs a ten person team across London, Barcelona and Porto.
What the product actually does
Quartz is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as an Account Information Service Provider. That is the regulated permission that lets an app read your account data without holding your money or moving it on your behalf.
The app connects to a user’s accounts and pulls pensions, individual savings accounts, savings and investments into one dashboard. An assistant called Charlie reads the portfolio alongside market movements and generates what the company calls personalised insights.
Quartz tested the platform publicly through the first quarter of 2026. Members currently track more than £10 million in assets through the application, and the company is letting waitlist users in batches through the App Store and Google Play.
The gap it is aiming at
The pitch is straightforward. Full wealth management is expensive and reserved for people with serious money. Standardised financial products are cheap but rigid. Quartz wants the middle ground, automated guidance priced for people who would never get a dedicated adviser.
It is a crowded middle ground. Revolut, Monzo and a long list of European apps already sit in it, and the founders know that market from the inside.
What a South African reader should take from it
The funding number is modest. £2,75 million is a pre-seed cheque, the money a company raises to prove a product works before anyone bets real scale on it. The interesting part for South Africa is the model, not the size.
Account information services of the kind Quartz operates under are possible because of open banking rules in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Those rules force banks to let licensed third parties read customer data at the customer’s request. South Africa has been building the same plumbing.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority has been working on an open finance framework for several years, and the country’s banks have been moving toward shared application programming interfaces. That work is slower and more uneven than the UK version, but the direction is the same.
South African developers have already shown what they can do with it. Stitch and Ozow built payment and account access infrastructure used by local businesses. Discovery and Capitec have put artificial intelligence into day to day banking for millions of customers, not a waitlist of early adopters. TymeBank and African Bank have pushed low cost digital banking into parts of the market the traditional banks did not reach.
The Quartz round is a reminder of where the value sits. A ten person team in three European cities raised £2,75 million on a product that reads accounts and explains them. The engineering is not exotic. The permission to operate is the hard part, and the market that rewards it is the one with the rules already written.
The regulatory point that matters
An Account Information Service Provider does not lend, does not hold deposits and does not execute trades. It reads. That is why the FCA permission is narrower than a banking licence and why the compliance burden is lighter.
For anyone watching South Africa’s own open finance debate, that distinction is the one to watch. The consumer protection questions, who can see your data, what they can do with it and how you withdraw consent, are the same questions the FSCA framework will have to answer here.
Quartz has not announced any South African launch or partnership. Its rollout is the UK first, through app store waitlists.
Source: Ventureburn, Quartz Secures £2.75M Pre-Seed Funding to Launch AI Personal Banker, 16 September 2026.
