FGV Announces $35 Million Fund For AI-FinTech Startups

Venture capital firm Fiat Ventures is rebranding after closing its oversubscribed $35 million fund.

The fund invests in early-state startups at the intersections of FinTech, financial access and artificial intelligence (AI), the company—now known as FGV Capital—said in a Tuesday (Aug. 25) news release.

Led by Marcos Fernandez, Drew Glover, Alex Harris and Rohit Ramkumar, FGV has, since its founding in 2018, worked with more than 325 companies in fields like FinTech, HealthTech and AI, driving “billions of dollars in revenue through all facets of go-to-market,” the company said.

“As AI reshapes what growth looks like and elevates the importance of distribution, FGV is intentionally building its proprietary AI-driven platform to remain at the forefront of this shift,” the news release said.

The release added that FGV offers services for portfolio companies such as customer acquisition and retention support, strategic finance, and talent recruitment.

“With Fund II, we’re applying that approach at institutional scale,” said Fernandez, FGV’s co-founder and managing partner. “We’re leading and co-leading more rounds, structuring transactions, and demonstrating that the real winners need a partner with a differentiated platform.”

According to the release, FGV’s portfolio now includes more than 40 companies, including Splitero, Brellium, Trellis, Sunfish, Possible Finance and Wagmo.

FGV’s efforts at the AI-FinTech intersection come at a time when many financial technology companies have yet to adopt some AI-related services.

For example, research by PYMNTS Intelligence published in June—from the report “AI at the FI: Inside Credit Unions’ Demand-Execution Gap”—found that only a third of FinTech executives say they offer AI-led chat support for customers of the firms they work with.

“In an era where DeepMind’s AlphaFold can map the structure of essentially every known protein and Anthropic’s Claude Code can generate what a non-computer programmer “vibe codes” in ordinary language, chat support for a bank customer or credit union member wanting to see if they qualify for a personal loan wouldn’t seem like rocket science,” PYMNTS wrote.

This trend seems even stranger after considering the other AI support services FinTechs are now able to offer. Just 16% of FinTechs provide products with AI financial advice, roughly on par with credit unions, at 17%. When it comes to AI payments, FinTechs are behind the curve: Just 12% offer that capability compared to 16% of credit unions. The question, PYMNTS wrote in June, is “Why?”

“These aren’t companies constrained by legacy mainframes or a reluctance to upset branch managers,” that report said. “They were built from scratch by engineers whose explicit mandate was to do things banks couldn’t or wouldn’t do. The technical challenge of an AI chat interface is, by their standards, not especially steep.”