SECTION 1: Company Overview

Adfin is a London-based fintech built to solve a deceptively simple problem: getting small businesses paid on time. But the approach is anything but simple.

The company pairs proprietary payment infrastructure with what it calls “agentic AI workflows”—autonomous agents that decide the best course of action to recover, reconcile, and accelerate invoice payments. Translation: an AI system that acts on behalf of your finance team, deciding which payment method to present, when to retry failed payments, how to sequence reminders, and when to escalate without human judgment bottlenecks.

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Company Overview

Standard Intelligence is a six-person AI research company headquartered in San Francisco. It closed a $75 million Series A on April 30, 2026, led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, at a pre-money valuation of approximately $425 million. The post-money figure lands near $500 million. That math gives you a company worth half a billion dollars before it has publicly shipped a product, staffed a sales team, or hired its tenth employee.

The investors behind the round are not tourists. Sonya Huang and Mikowai Ashwill represented Sequoia. Yasmin Razavi led for Spark Capital. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and ran Tesla’s Autopilot program; Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most respected macro investors alive; and Milan Kovac, former head of Autopilot software at Tesla.

The founding team is Galen Mead (21) and Devansh Pandey (20). They met as teenagers through the Atlas Fellowship, a selective program for high-school students focused on AI alignment. Both concluded, independently and then together, that AGI was arriving faster than institutions understood. Both left their undergraduate programs to act on that conclusion. Mead had been enrolled at the University of Toronto. Sequoia’s written description of them is unusually pointed: “taste, scrappiness, technical courage, and ambition” in a combination the firm found rare enough to write a very large check.

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