Today, we are thrilled to lead MarvelX’s $6 mn pre-seed round. MarvelX is developing vertical AI agents that automate the manual, compliance‑heavy workflows that keep insurers, banks and fintechs awake at night. We’re truly excited to partner with founder Ali el Hassouni and the team on their mission to make financial services run like the tech companies they always have aspired to be.

MarvelX lets financial institutions deploy secure, self‑learning AI agents that handle claims, compliance and fraud workflows end‑to‑end — without shelling out millions for in-house AI teams.

Compliance alone accounts for 5 % of banking revenue, squeezing margins further. According to our internal analysis, banks and insurance firms pay €300bn annually in salaries to 4.5 mn employees engaged in ops heavy tasks. We believe regulatory and workflow complexity of the industry creates a huge opportunity for vertical software to create value, and capture sizable market share.

The timing for MarvelX couldn’t be better. Gen AI is already delivering tangible results across the banking spectrum. Bunq now resolves 40% of user queries and over 70% of customer support with AI, Goldman Sachs rolled out its GS AI Assistant to around 10,000 employees with a goal to reach every knowledge worker, and Cleo, our portfolio company, is hitting $200m ARR with 100% year‑over‑year growth—analysing 6,000 transactions per minute and engaging in 200,000 AI conversations daily. Klarna has trimmed its workforce from 5,000 to 3,800, and is eyeing further cuts, thanks to AI‑driven efficiencies. With global banks anticipating a reduction of roughly 200,000 jobs in the coming years as AI takes over routine tasks, the pressure to adopt efficiency‑focused solutions, especially in compliance and KYB, has never been greater. Yet, despite these advances, there is still no clear leader in operational AI for finance.

Legacy tooling — green‑screen core systems, RPA scripts, and armies of Excel jockeys — simply can’t keep up with data volumes or regulator expectations. The result: costs shoot up, customer experience stalls, and risk piles up.

In the background, several tailwinds are creating a fertile ground to enhance the impact of AI in financial services. There’s rapid iteration in financial services specific language models and evaluation benchmarks, large institutions are warming up to AI while implementing necessary guard rails for responsible AI, and human-AI user interface has evolved to the earliest maturity to enable impact at an enterprise level. Put together, accuracy, explainability, responsibility and measurable ROI are converging, clearing the runway for MarvelX-grade products.

At EQT, we have invested in and/ or are majority owners of regulated financial services globally in the form of banks, lenders, insurers, revenue cycle management and tech enablers. This gives us a unique vantage point to understand, assess and help accelerate businesses in the category.

We believe MarvelX will do for financial operations what Cursor did for software engineering and what Parloa is doing for call centres — replacing brittle legacy stacks with agentic automation that keeps learning.

Ali pairs deep AI chops (PhD in reinforcement learning) with nine years seeing Bunq scale to 1,000 people. We knew from our very first meeting that he's truly special — the rare founder who speaks both GPU and GDPR. Ali has already deployed AI in production across customer support, payments, fraud and risk, so he understands exactly where automation creates value in an enterprise setting. He might joke that a mutual love of Real Madrid sparked early camaraderie with Tom, and this is us putting it out to the universe that our conviction in him runs far deeper.

He’s now surrounded by a young, hungry crew of engineers and insurance veterans who ship fast and obsess over customer feedback.

MarvelX is off to the races. The platform is live with its first paying customers and is already generating revenue. Demand exceeds capacity, with a growing waitlist of banks and insurers eager to integrate. The team ships new workflows weekly and is scaling up to meet the pull from the market.

We couldn’t be more excited to join Ali on this journey. If you’re an insurer, bank or fintech wrestling with manual ops, reach out — we’d love to introduce you.

— The EQT Ventures Fintech Team
Tom, Rania, Marnix