The arc of fintech and innovation in financial services broadly has historically been one focused on front-end innovation - consumer-grade UIs, mobile-first and cloud-native. All this time, back-office operations remained manual, error-prone and hugely labour-intensive. We’re now at a point where frontier models and agents have reached a capability threshold needed to tackle all of these processes. 

Bringing AI into regulated enterprises requires maniacal focus on building systems - deterministic decisions married with the intelligence of probabilistic models, enhanced with domain-specific reasoning. The leading banks and fintechs know they have to embrace the change and innovate. We’ve seen it first-hand from the many years that we have been partnering with fintechs at Earlybird. 

That’s why we’re excited to back Porters to become the company that defines this category.

A Broken Cost Structure in Banking Operations

Every bank spends millions on in-house or outsourced teams handling garnishments, chargebacks, insolvencies, and legal orders. These processes are compliance-heavy and painfully manual.

There are various structural reasons that make this market ripe for AI.

1. High-Volume, High-Risk Manual Workflows

Banks receive hundreds of thousands of garnishment and levy orders each year. Every case requires reviewing legal documents, checking accounts, freezing funds where necessary, notifying customers, and responding to authorities, often under strict regulatory deadlines. The stakes are high: delays or mistakes can expose banks to significant financial and legal risk.

Chargebacks are even more explosive. Volumes are in the hundreds of millions globally each year, representing tens of billions in transaction value, and growing steadily. Operationally, these disputes require substantial back-office capacity, often translating into large teams dedicated solely to dispute handling.

This is not marginal overhead. For large institutions, dispute operations alone can cost many millions annually, before factoring in fines, arbitration fees, and reputational risk.

2. BPOs lack incentive alignment

Historically, banks outsourced these workflows to BPO providers, who are themselves not incentivised to invest in automation to deliver these services at a lower cost. Their business models are at odds with 

3. RPA Falls Short

Traditional RPA tools are brittle and limited in automation potential. They tend to break when user interfaces change, struggle to interpret messy PDFs or unstructured emails, and require constant maintenance to stay robust.

But regulated financial workflows demand far more than deterministic scripts. They require contextual reasoning across ambiguous inputs, jurisdiction-specific application of legal rules, full auditability and traceability, and structured human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Until recently, AI systems were not reliable enough to manage these open-ended legal and compliance cases at the production level. 

That is now beginning to change.

Porters: Agentic Automation for Regulated Workflows

Enter our latest portfolio company, Porters. Porters builds end-to-end AI agents that take full ownership of regulated back-office cases. The platform plugs into banks’ CRMs and core systems, ingests cases from government portals or dispute rails, extracts facts from messy documents using LLMs, and applies a deterministic rule engine to enforce hard compliance constraints. Human approvals are embedded where needed, and every response is returned in a legally compliant, fully traceable way.

What sets Porters apart is its vertical focus. It comes with pre-coded regulatory rule packs, high-uptime banking integrations, and regulation-grade auditability, every action logged and replayable. Operations teams can reconfigure workflows without code as volumes shift.

Why We Invested, and Why Now? 

We have known the Porters co-founders for years, having gotten to initially meet them during their time at portfolio company Upvest. Their qualities shone through, being among the strongest operators across go-to- market and client delivery tackling truly enterprise financial services sales cycles. They bring deep domain expertise, a proven ability to win and implement with banks, first-hand experience navigating regulatory constraints, and a forward-deployed engineering mindset suited to complex enterprise deployments.

This is a team that has lived through enterprise banking implementations, from procurement to compliance to integration, and deeply understands what it takes to go from pilot to production.

We’re now at an inflection point. Frontier model capabilities are only now reaching the reliability required to handle open-ended, compliance-heavy workflows in regulated environments. Porters is entering the market at this tipping point.

We’re glad to partner with Porters since Day One!