At Work-Bench, we’ve long believed that enterprise AI must do more than dazzle in demos, it has to deliver in production. Nowhere is this truer than in Financial Services, where complexity, compliance, and legacy systems make meaningful automation a high-stakes challenge.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that we led a $6M Seed investment in Artian AI, a company building reliable autonomous AI agents for business-critical processes, at true enterprise scale.

🚀 The Team

The Artian AI founding team has some of the deepest founder-market fit we’ve seen. With experience spanning Wall Street and Silicon Valley, they’ve lived both the complexity of financial systems and the cutting edge of AI innovation.

The founders are:

  • Prashant Reddy: The former Head of AI & Data at JPMorgan, with prior roles at Google and Morgan Stanley, and a PhD from CMU in ML
  • Keith Andrew: A former Head of FX / Market Making at firms like Morgan Stanley, KCG Holdings, and Galaxy Digital

The founders helped bring automation to Wall Street, pioneering algorithmic trading systems and autonomous market makers across banks, building arguably the first real-world agent-based systems, decades before it was a buzzword.

During diligence an exec from a top global bank told us that the trading infrastructure that the founders built in the early ‘00s at Morgan Stanley is still best-in-class. That’s the kind of impact we’re talking about.

They speak the language of enterprise buyers and developers alike, building trust through shared experience and real empathy for their users’ day-to-day pain.

🧩 The Problem

Financial institutions are under relentless pressure to streamline operations, reduce costs, and drive innovation. Yet the realities they face like highly complex environments, rapidly evolving market dynamics, and a stringent regulatory landscape make traditional automation approaches not just insufficient, but often counterproductive.

While modern AI agents offer the promise of intelligent automation, they frequently fall short where it matters most:

  • Real-World Variability: Most AI solutions are brittle, struggling to adapt to the messy, unpredictable scenarios that define real-world financial operations.
  • Lack of Domain Expertise: Generic AI agents fail to grasp the deep, domain-specific intricacies that are fundamental to understanding financial data, processes, and risk governance requirements.
  • Workflow Disconnects: Without seamless integration into established enterprise systems and processes, AI agents become isolated, limiting their ability to deliver true end-to-end value.
  • Data Management: Typical architectures for AI agents do not provide enough capabilities to govern data confidentiality levels, access entitlements, and localization requirements.

In Financial Services, building agents isn’t just a technical challenge, but a cross-functional effort that requires tight alignment across dev, data, and business teams. If done right, it delivers vastly improved agility, efficiency, and customer experience, all while ensuring security and compliance are never compromised.

🛠️ The Product

Enter Artian, with a new kind of AI automation platform built for this exact challenge.

The Artian Intelligence Platform delivers:

  • Ready-to-use, finance-specific AI agents, capable of tackling high-reliability workflows across front, middle, and back office
  • A natural language agent builder experience that empowers both traditional engineers and business technologists
  • A multi-agent orchestration system, designed for scale, human oversight, and governance in complex enterprise environments
  • The Artian Agent Exchange, enabling agent collaboration across use cases—and eventually, across institutions

This isn’t AI for toy use cases. Artian is AI for production—designed to integrate with legacy systems, operate within regulatory constraints, and scale across the enterprise.

We’re proud to back Artian AI as they help financial institutions unlock the full power of agentic AI: securely, scalably, and with domain expertise at the core.

If you're a large financial institution thinking about how to bring agentic automation capabilities to your organization, definitely reach out to the Artian AI team.

Lunch with the Artian founders at our Work-Bench go-to lunch spot Edo Sushi, at Union Square.