Finance has evolved — but we're just getting started.
Fintech reshaped how we move, borrow, and grow money. Now, AI is unlocking the next wave: financial services that are smarter, faster, and economically viable for massive new markets.
AI is projected to drive $180 billion in new financial services growth over the next five years. In the U.S. alone, millions of individuals and small businesses—previously too costly for banks to serve—are now within reach.
This is a commercially significant segment that has remained under-monetized due to structural inefficiencies, outdated risk models, and high operational costs. AI is removing these constraints, opening the door to a new generation of fintech companies positioned to capture this margin-rich opportunity.
These aren't charity cases. They're the nurse paying $2,500 annually in fees that could be redirected to better products. The gig worker with consistent earnings who's ideal for alternative lending. The small business owner with reliable revenue who needs adapted capital solutions. Early fintech made advances, but like traditional banks, couldn't solve the unit economics for these segments.
What makes this moment different?
We are at an inflection point in financial services, where the leap from Fintech as we know it to AI-native finance is not just incremental—it's transformative. Modern fintech brought digitization, faster payments, and sleek user experiences, disrupting banks with mobile apps, APIs, and cloud infrastructure. But the next era belongs to intelligence-first finance. AI is shifting financial systems from static tools to dynamic, autonomous agents—systems that learn, reason, and personalize in real time. We’re moving beyond automation to augmentation: portfolios that optimize themselves, fraud detection that evolves instantly, underwriting that adapts to behavior, and financial assistants that engage, advise, and act. In this new paradigm, user experiences aren’t just digital—they’re conversational, predictive, and deeply personalized. We believe the next generation of category-defining financial companies will be AI-native from day one, rethinking how money flows, decisions are made, and trust is earned.
After more than a decade at the intersection of technology and financial services, I’ve never seen a more compelling convergence of capability and need. The infrastructure is ready. The models are powerful. The market is demanding more adaptive solutions. Now is the time to build—and we’re backing the founders bold enough to redefine finance.
The Market Gap: Why Previous Approaches Fell Short
Legacy credit models, rigid risk frameworks, and static user experiences placed a ceiling on how far technology could advance financial outcomes. Underserved markets remained out of reach—constrained by narrow data sets and outdated underwriting practices. While a handful of notable companies pushed boundaries in recent years, these efforts were largely limited by the tools available at the time—rule-based systems and narrowly scoped machine learning models.
Now, there has been a dramatic leap in the power and accessibility of AI, including large language models and advanced predictive algorithms. These new capabilities allow financial systems to reason across complex, unstructured data, personalize decisions in real time, and operate as autonomous agents that continuously learn and evolve. This is a fundamental shift enabling financial products that are not only automated but truly intelligent and adaptive.
Accordingly, the opportunity to unlock new markets, personalize services at scale, and manage risk proactively remains largely untapped. Traditional financial institutions and first-generation fintech have struggled to profitably serve non-traditional market segments for three key reasons:
Data Limitations – Conventional underwriting models rely on narrow data sets (FICO, employment history, etc.) that fail to capture the actual creditworthiness of customers with non-standard financial profiles. This artificially restricts the addressable market.
Distribution Inefficiency – Acquisition costs for these customers through conventional channels often exceed lifetime value, creating a flawed unit economics equation that positions them as "unprofitable."
Product-Market Misalignment – Products designed for conventional financial profiles often fail to address the actual needs of this segment, leading to low adoption, poor engagement, and missed revenue opportunities.
These limitations created a market assumption that serving these customers requires accepting lower margins or subsidizing services - a false premise based on outdated technological constraints.
Investment Focus Areas
Spotlight Venture Partners is actively investing in U.S. based companies building across three critical layers:
Capturing Untapped Customer Segments: Companies using AI-powered acquisition and behavioral insights to unlock new markets for credit, insurance, and banking products—turning previously unprofitable segments into high-growth opportunities.
Modernizing Legacy Infrastructure: Companies that transform how financial institutions operate by upgrading payment systems, core banking platforms, risk management, and data analytics—creating the technological foundation that enables banks and fintechs to compete in an AI-driven market.
Optimizing Business Workflows and Operations: Companies that enable businesses across industries to access capital, payments, compliance, and financial management tools that streamline their operations and improve efficiency.
We look for founding teams who combine deep financial expertise with advanced AI/ML capabilities, with a particular focus on founders who bring unique insights into the markets they serve.