Breaking the AI black box: Taktile’s $54M round validates its decisioning approach as early customer Zilch hits 50% in cost reduction 

Every financial institution makes high-stakes risk decisions, such as who gets approved for a loan, which transactions are flagged for fraud, and how compliance risks are managed. However, most banks and fintechs still rely on rigid, black-box systems or manual workflows that are slow, costly, and difficult to improve. As a result, AI adoption in financial services remains broken.

Born in Berlin and now headquartered in New York, Taktile aims to give fintech companies and banks full control over AI-powered decisions. The category-defining decision automation platform recently raised $54M in a Series B round to continue empowering teams at fintech companies and financial institutions to optimise their risk management strategies across the entire customer lifecycle.

Balderton Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Index VenturesTiger GlobalY CombinatorProsus VenturesVisionaries Club, and Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury. This brings Taktile’s total funding to $79M; the valuation was not disclosed.

Speaking to TFN, Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO and co-founder of Taktile, said: “This $54M Series B is fuel to accelerate our vision by advancing AI-driven risk decisioning, enhancing our platform to support even more complex, enterprise-grade workflows, expanding into new markets and financial sectors, bringing transparent AI decisioning to more fintech, banks, and insurers globally, scaling our team, and hiring world-class talent — especially in engineering, AI, and go-to-market teams- to drive our next phase of growth.”

Breaking down barriers: How Taktile transforms financial decision-making

Traditional methods typically involve hard-coded logic in backend systems, making it difficult for non-technical teams to adjust decision criteria without IT department support. Wehmeyer explained, “Many companies build decisioning logic in-house, which is expensive, slow to iterate, and heavily reliant on engineers. Others rely on black-box AI models, which lack transparency, making them hard to govern and trust — especially in regulated industries. The result? Fintechs struggle to scale, and banks risk costly compliance failures.”

He added, “Taktile is the decisioning platform for fintech and banks, giving them full control over AI-powered risk decisions. Our no-code, highly flexible platform allows teams to design, test, and optimise their decision logic in real time without relying on engineers to make changes.”

Founded in 2020 by Maik Taro Wehmeyer and Maximilian Eber, Taktile seeks to simplify automated decision-making in financial services, especially in risk management. The startup offers risk teams and engineers a platform to build and manage complex AI-driven workflows embedded in business logic, transforming AI from an experiment into a valuable business tool.

The co-founders met at Harvard and were on the leadership team at QuantCo, which develops AI-powered apps for enterprises. They founded Taktile based on their QuantCo experience, noting that many automated financial service decisions were poorly designed, inadequately tested, and needed significant engineering, often leading to guesswork in critical decision-making processes.

From Europe to the US: London is no longer a fintech magnet?

Wehmeyer explained why Taktile chose NYC for its headquarters: “Founded in the US in 2020, we faced entry restrictions due to Covid as German nationals. Participating remotely in Y-Combinator from Berlin, we couldn’t wait for Covid to pass, so we built the product and hired our first engineers there. Thus, Taktile’s R&D is in Europe while its headquarters and most GTM functions are in NYC, with a London office for important customer-facing functions, the market.”

The company serves various clients across 24 markets, including fintech companies like Mercury, Kueski, and Zilch and established financial institutions such as Allianz and Rakuten Bank. Over the past 12 months, Taktile has helped its customer Zilch reduce service provider and usage costs by 50% by giving their risk team the tools to build, test, and optimise automated underwriting workflows themselves.

“Taktile’s platform has empowered our teams to take control of our automated underwriting processes, allowing us to build, test, and optimise decisions with unprecedented speed and independence,” said Chanuka Perera, Head of Credit Risk at Zilch. “This shift has not only streamlined our operations but has also resulted in significant cost savings, freeing up resources for further innovation.”

G2 has recognised the company as a category leader for three consecutive quarters, recently earning over 12 accolades in the Winter 2025 report. Taktile also gained industry recognition, winning the “Tech of the Future — Decision Making” at the 2024 Banking Tech Awards USA, hosted by FinTech Futures. By 2024, Taktile had grown significantly, quadrupling its customer base and increasing its ARR by over 3.5x. When asked, Taktile didn’t disclose the financial metrics.

How Taktile’s Platform Makes AI Decisioning Transparent

While some platforms, like SAS Viya, offer broader analytics capabilities, others like DecisionRules focus more narrowly on rule-based decisions. Taktile empowers risk experts to build and optimise AI-powered decision flows without extensive coding, particularly in the financial services sector.

Taktile’s decision platform already delivers hundreds of millions of risk decisions monthly. The additional funding will accelerate this momentum as Taktile equips business teams with the tools and controls needed to build transparent AI-powered risk decisioning.

At its core, Taktile’s platform enables risk experts and business teams to build, test, and optimise AI-powered decision flows with minimal coding. This allows financial institutions to improve decision accuracy and risk selection quickly, helps companies bring products to market faster and adapt proactively to changing environments, and provides a no-code interface for non-technical employees to manage decision flows.

Rob Moffat, General Partner at Balderton Capital, said: “Taktile’s integrated decisioning platform allows businesses to take one consistent view of the customer and easily build, iterate and test complex decision logic. This has won them some of the most sophisticated fintechs as happy clients and allows them to expand into banks and insurers.”

As Wehmeyer concluded, “AI decisioning shouldn’t be a black box. Over the next few years, we’re ensuring that fintech and banks can fully leverage AI—safely, transparently, and with total control over their risk decisions. As AI becomes a core part of risk management, Taktile ensures fintechs don’t have to choose between speed, compliance, and control—they get all three.”

Source: https://techfundingnews.com/