Founder Spotlight: Sid Jayakumar, Finster AI

What led you to found your company?

Sid: I came to the UK after receiving a scholarship to study Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. I had always envisaged doing my degree then moving to Silicon Valley, but my plans changed when I met Demis Hassabis,  the DeepMind founder, at an event – after much persistence, DeepMind eventually let me join as their first ever undergraduate intern. That summer, I saw up close the immense potential of AI and the true talent density of DeepMind. I was hooked, so decided to start work straight away instead of going back to Cambridge for my final year. 

I spent seven years at DeepMind – primarily building and training large language models – and was increasingly getting excited by the growth in the AI space. I could clearly see the opportunity for verticalized products and the impact that they could have in revolutionizing the way people do work and the way we interact with technology around us. I specifically noticed there were two kinds of products taking shape.

The first were areas where the core AI problem was largely solved, and the real challenge was product and distribution.  Things like customer support tools, email assistants, and personal productivity products. The hard questions there were around UI/UX, identifying the exact user need, and building effective go-to-market strategies.

The second category was far more interesting to me: domains where the AI and technical problems themselves were still unsolved. I’d put areas like healthcare, law, and finance into this group. These industries have powerful incumbents and deeply entrenched workflows, but the real question is how AI can go beyond what already exists. What are the hard technical problems that still need solving? And if you were to truly reimagine workflows from first principles, what would they look like?

As a technical founder, I am excited by these huge unsolved problems. I started Finster as I had always been interested in finance and I could see the issues in the space –  How do you use real-time data? How do you make a product that is hallucination free? How do you give answers that are instantly auditable? And how structured and numerical data should interact with models that are fundamentally trained on text? Finance has uniquely hard problems and if you can solve them, it’s an enormous market.

 

What big problem are you solving?

Sid: The job of technology in finance should be to remove mundane, repetitive tasks, and to augment people’s key high value skill sets – which to me include building relationships and using your intelligence, experience, knowledge and taste to build theses and exercise meaningful judgements. 

We’ve already seen progress here with tools that aggregate data and automate parts of the workflow. But what really excites me about AI in finance is the move beyond automation and aggregation, into true personalization.

AI will adapt to what we need, based on when we need it and how we interact with it. The way I experience technology will be fundamentally different from the way a coworker experiences technology.

You can already see early versions of this. For some people, ChatGPT is a brainstorming tool. For me, it might be a writing assistant or thought partner. For others, it’s an editing tool, a tutor, or a way to learn a second language. Today, we achieve that personalization through explicit prompting.

In the future we’re going to do that implicitly because AI will be personalized… So for investment bankers and asset managers, we’re building technology that gives them what they want, when they need it, before they even know that they need it, in an extremely proactive and personalized way, which is the next evolution of how they interact with data.

 

What new opportunities are you facing right now?

Sid: We’ve been very lucky. There’s a genuine moment in the market right now where there’s a lot of interest from potential buyers. The opportunity is real, the message is really resonating. We’re speaking to all the major bulge bracket banks and large asset managers about how we can work with them. 

For us the biggest thing in this is we strive to be seen as not just a vendor, but as a thought partner. We help them think in an unbiased way about what they need, and then where we might fit into that puzzle. It’s a really, really great time to be in this space. As always, there’s a need to move very quickly and continually keep building to a very high quality standard.

 

In your view, what is the most important step for building an enduring company?

Sid: Defining and maintaining your DNA and culture. In the past year, we have raised two rounds of funding, gone from seven to nearly thirty people, earned real revenue and significantly grown our pipeline of prospective customers. On paper, everything has changed quite dramatically, but in the day to day you notice it less because our values and focus stay the same – and we will always focus on individual ownership and accountability while remaining agile and moving fast.

As we think about the next phase of growth, Series B and beyond, we are working to productize and professionalize certain systems, whilst maintaining our DNA and culture, in order to deliver growth at scale. Doing that requires a lot of proactive communication across the team, consistently, and that is a constant question for founders and exec teams to solve.

 

How are you thinking about global expansion?

Sid: We’re London-based, but finance is global and from day one, we always knew we were going to be present in London and New York.

We were focused on London longer than I originally would have guessed and that was for positive reasons: the pool of talent is so dense here, especially with AI and with finance, fintech is something that the city’s always done very, very well. 

That being said, it’s important to have teams on the ground, near your clients.  You obviously want customer facing people on the ground for client meetings, but you also want product and engineering people there so that any feedback is transmitted immediately. So we opened our New York office in the middle of 2025 with the hire of Chris Andrews, who was previously the Global COO of Research at Morgan Stanley, and we have about seven people there currently.

We’re always up-skilling, hiring better than ourselves and expanding. We have a few people in Asia now and we’re increasing our work there. I could see us being in four or five cities within the next 18 to 24 months. It’s about expanding at the right speed.

 

How did you come to meet Hoxton Ventures?

Sid: My first in person introduction to Hoxton was to Payton. 

We had shared backgrounds, having spent long tenures at Google (I was early into DeepMind and Payton led Google’s UK hardware business). We bonded immediately over our first email; Payton told me he had been looking for a company like Finster. 

We had both just moved out into the VC startup world. We were also aligned on what we liked about big tech and what we didn’t like. So, there was a lot of immediate mutual respect and we hit it off from day one. 

Payton is very straight shooting, and in our early discussions it was very clear about what he liked, where he had doubts, and where the rest of the partnership had doubts.

It felt like a conversation between adults where we were trying to figure out if there was a way to do this together as opposed to “you pitch us while we sit in our verified air and figure out whether we’re going to give you money.” 

That’s a really good dynamic. It was clear at that moment that I wanted to take their money, a moment where every other term sheet had an exploding offer. They’re the only ones who said “do whatever it takes, renegotiate, doesn’t matter. We want to do this with you.”

After that, with every other VC I spoke with, I told them I was happy for them to put in money – on the condition that Hoxton leads.

It’s been straight talk from day one and we have been very aligned. Even when there are disagreements, mutual respect stays strong.

 

What has been your most memorable moment, or point in time from your partnership with Hoxton Ventures?

Sid: Payton and the team are really good at knowing what founders need at different stages, it’s impressive at how well they play their roles and how these roles have changed as we have scaled. 

Early on, Payton served more as a mentor or father figure. For the first six months, we would meet for weekly Friday breakfasts. He realized instinctively that what I needed as a new founder was just some time off and somebody to talk to – about life, not just work. I didn’t really realise it at the time but this was his way of helping me relax and think clearly. I was working non-stop f so these breakfasts were a two hour break on a Friday morning where I could think beyond the immediate work for the next day. 

As we have grown Finster, Payton has very much transitioned into helping me think about structure, growth, speed and quality. Payton spent 20 years across Google leading huge organizations across sales, marketing, product, executive teams in all kinds of capacities. 

And today at Series A, all of that stuff that Payton knows about scaling teams, hiring execs and building a leadership group, how you hold people accountable, and how you reward people is really coming to the fore.

 

Any advice for founders raising capital right now?

Sid: I’d say three things. First, Go easy on yourself and keep doing what you’re doing. A term sheet may arrive on day 1 or take a year to achieve, but you need to keep persisting and believing in your vision.

The second piece of advice I’d give is to be really clear with yourself before you start fundraising on why you are doing this. There are many correct answers, but there are also wrong answers. If the goal is just to make money, there are easier ways to do it. If the goal is power, there are probably easier ways to gain it. You have to be excited about every part of your business – the idea, the opportunity, the team that you are building – because that is what will help you find perspective in the difficult moments when everything sucks and what will motivate you to push on.

The third I’ll say is I think the brand of the VC matters, but not as much as the individual investors themselves. People fixate on the VC brand during a fundraise, but then if you don’t get along with them, you’ll never think about it again. Every VC will say they are “founder friendly”, a somewhat flexible and ill-defined term, so it comes down to who do you want to work with. This ultimately means rusting your gut and instinct on asking: “is this the person I want to work with for 10 years.”