Quartz nets £2.75M pre-seed from Daphni to build AI wealth advisor
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 2 sources
Quartz raised £2.75M to launch an AI wealth app that links your pensions and investments. The catch: it’s giving advice before it has a licence to do that.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Quartz has raised £2.75 million in pre-seed funding, with Daphni leading the round and Outward VC and K Fund also backing the London startup. The company was founded by former Revolut and N26 staff, and it is opening an invitation-only waitlist this week on both the App Store and Google Play.
The pitch is simple enough to grasp and a little awkward in practice. Quartz connects a user’s pensions, ISAs, savings and investments in one place, then uses an AI assistant called Charlie to suggest how to allocate money more effectively and cut tax. André Silva, who founded the company in 2025 with Mateus Mesquita Alves, describes it as a “personal banker.”
But Quartz does not yet have the licence that would make that description cleanly true. The firm is authorised by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority only as an account information service provider, which lets it aggregate data but not give regulated financial advice. Silva says the team wants that status in the future. For now, the company is threading a narrow path: advice-like guidance, without advice permissions.
That edge is part of the product. Quartz says the AI does not do calculations itself; separate tools handle the maths, while the model pulls in the results. It also routes unclear cases to human reviewers, tracks each user’s goals and risk profile, and has already spent a year under human review and training. The system is built on models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Silva sees the main competition as offline financial advisers, not other apps. He draws a line between Quartz and budgeting tools like Emma and Cleo, and between Quartz and neobanks like Revolut and eToro, which only offer AI advice to their own customers. Daphni partner Paul Bazin is betting that this mix of product and regulatory structure is the point. The bigger question is whether users will trust an AI to act like an adviser before the regulator says it can.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Quartz is doing the classic fintech move: move first, ask permission later, then call it innovation. That works beautifully right up until the moment a regulator decides “not licensed” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The real test here isn’t the chatbot; it’s whether consumers want financial guidance from software that still has one foot outside the rules.
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