Goldman Sachs has been particularly active in the last 2 years, backing 4 unique companies applying AI in financial technology. Deals and dollars to startups using AI algorithms reached record levels in 2016. The trend is revolutionizing several industries including healthcare, business intelligence, and advertising. Particularly, startups using machine learning and natural language processing to solve problems in the financial sector have piqued investors' interest in recent years. As we mentioned in our AI heatmap, deals to AI in the financial services area have seen an uptick since 2014.

Bots and artificial intelligence company Kasisto today announced that it has raised $9.2 million. The money will be used to bolster the company's personal finance bot KAI and expand its AI virtual assistant offerings to markets beyond finance. When asked by VentureBeat, the company declined to state which industries it plans to enter but said that specifics would be shared at a later date. Kasisto is a spinoff of SRI International, creator of Apple virtual assistant Siri. Kasisto launched AI-powered KAI for personal finance and banking last June.

Deals and dollars to startups using AI algorithms reached record levels in 2016. The trend is revolutionizing several industries including healthcare, business intelligence, and advertising. Particularly, startups using machine learning and natural language processing to solve problems in the financial sector have piqued investors' interest in recent years. As we mentioned in our AI heatmap, deals to AI in the financial services area have seen an uptick since 2014. The competition in the space is heating up as several companies focused on core AI technologies, like Sentient Technologies and Ayasdi, are bringing their products to fintech, for applications ranging from quantitative trading and sentiment analysis to threat detection and risk analytics.