Gradient Labs Wins Bronze at Money20/20 Banking Awards
Gradient Labs, a London-based AI company that builds customer support agents for financial services, has won Bronze in the AI and Automation subcategory of the Banking category at The Money Awards 2026, held during Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas. The award recognizes the startup’s measurable results in live production environments, a key criterion for entry in the Banking category.
Bronze Recognition for Production Results
The Money Awards 2026, Money20/20 USA’s global awards program, honors innovation and impact across financial technology and services. Winners are selected through a multi-stage judging process. The Banking category required entrants to demonstrate at least 12 months of measurable outcomes in live deployment.
Despite launching less than two years ago, Gradient Labs’ AI agent now resolves most customer cases end-to-end, with human verification applied at the final stage. For instance, in a card dispute, the agent collects and verifies evidence, reaches a decision, and upon human approval, files the chargeback with the card network.
Dimitri Masin, CEO and Co-Founder, emphasized that the greatest challenge lies not in the agent itself but in the surrounding system—its design, maintenance, and monitoring once deployed. “That’s why this award, which only counts results in production, means so much to us,” he said.
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Founded by Former Monzo Experts
Gradient Labs was founded in London in 2023 by Dimitri Masin, Neal Lathia, and Danai Antoniou, all formerly of Monzo’s data science and machine learning teams. At the challenger bank, they focused on modest 10% efficiency gains in customer support automation.
Following the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 in March 2023, the team began testing its potential and concluded that much of the manual, repetitive work in financial services could be automated. This realization led to the creation of Gradient Labs and its focus on vertical AI applications.
According to Masin, banks and fintechs spend most of their time managing operational complexity. “Even neo and challenger banks, built from scratch to do things differently, eventually reach a scale where the burden of operations overwhelms their ability to innovate,” he wrote in a company blog post.
Customer Impact and Expansion
Gradient Labs serves over 32 million end users, with clients including Wise, Yonder, and Zego. Zego deployed an AI agent named Alex to handle customer queries via live chat and email. The insurer reported a 25% drop in call volumes, with customer satisfaction rising from 61% to 77% and resolution rates climbing from 41% to 60% within two months.
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Yonder adopted Gradient Labs’ AI agent in mid-2025 for frontline chat and email support. The credit card provider later added a lending agent for collections and a disputes agent, reducing average case times from five to seven days to approximately two days.
Wise also partners with Gradient Labs to provide faster, clearer customer support at scale. The company has publicly noted that the collaboration prioritizes resolving queries over deflecting them.
Funding and Future Outlook
In June 2026, Gradient Labs doubled its Series A funding to US$26 million. With a U.S. expansion underway and a growing list of enterprise clients, the company enters 2027 backed by both financial support and proven results.
