OpenAI backs Poetic's $50M round to automate high-stakes financial underwriting and compliance

OpenAI backs Poetic to automate underwriting and compliance

Valued at $500M and backed by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins too, the startup says its AI runs high-stakes financial processes 'with the precision of code'. Its claims are big, and its disclosures thin. Poetic, an AI startup that has been operating in stealth, has emerged with $50M in funding and a $500M valuation to automate some of finance's most sensitive back-office work, from insurance underwriting to compliance and fraud checks. Its backers include OpenAI, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and Kleiner Perkins. The company was founded by Markie Wagner, a former Google and Waymo machine-learning engineer who previously ran the AI consultancy Delphi Labs. Its pitch is a single line: "turn your business into software." Poetic's system ingests a firm's procedures, training videos, and expert feedback, runs processes end-to-end, and, the company says, repairs itself when the underlying software changes. To make that affordable at scale, it has built its own programming language for directing AI. Big claims, blue-chip names, thin disclosure The customer list is the eye-catching part: SoFi, AIG, and Chime are named users. Poetic claims striking results, including 100 per cent accuracy on automated fraud decisioning, 99 per cent-plus quality processing insurance broker quotes for AIG, and $200M a year saved on fraud detection for one Fortune 500 financial firm. "What Poetic has built is genuinely different," said Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, saying it executes complex processes "with accuracy that exceeds what human teams can deliver." Those are the company's own figures, and they are large. Poetic has disclosed little about how the system actually works, which makes them hard to verify, the kind of opacity that matters most when the pitch is automating regulated, high-stakes decisions. The company says client data stays in the customer's own environment with zero retention, and lists SOC 2 Type II, PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. OpenAI is funding its own ecosystem The more telling story may be the backer. OpenAI has steadily turned into a platform company with an investment arm, seeding application-layer startups that run on its models, from agent-swarm builder Isara to its own $10bn private-equity deployment vehicle. Each cheque deepens a network of companies that extend, and depend on, OpenAI's technology. Poetic is wading into a fast-filling category, enterprise workflow automation, where it is far from alone and where the shift from generative to agentic AI in finance is already under way. The open question is whether "100 per cent accuracy" survives contact with a regulator, an auditor, and the messy edge cases that make underwriting and compliance hard in the first place. For now, the money, and OpenAI's name, are betting it can.

OpenAI backs automation start-up Poetic in $50m round

Poetic is an automation start-up servicing companies including Sofi and Chime. OpenAI is backing automation start-up Poetic in a $50m funding round as it emerges from stealth, Bloomberg news reported today (10 June). Poetic is developing a platform to automate time-consuming tasks using AI across wide use cases, including finance and insurance underwriting. The company boasts 100pc accuracy in AI-powered fraud detection and claims to have saved Fortune 500 financial services companies $200m. According to Bloomberg, Poetic has created a new programming language meant to help professionals use AI more efficiently. The company was founded in 2023 as Forge by Markie Wagner, a Thiel Foundation fellow who worked as a researcher at Stanford and Waymo. Wagner also founded and led an AI consultancy called Delphi. She holds computer science degrees from the University of South California and Stanford. According to Poetic's website, the company is backed by Kleiner Perkins and Peter Theil's Founders Fund, with participation from OpenAI, First Harmonic and Genius Ventures. Its website lists American International Group, Chime and Sofi as customers. Poetic is expected to announce the funding round today. "What Poetic has built is genuinely different - a platform that can execute the complex, high-stakes processes that large enterprises actually run, with accuracy that exceeds what human teams can deliver," Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at Kleiner Perkins told Bloomberg news. Poetic is hiring for a range of roles in the US, including engineering, strategy and office management. OpenAI's support for Poetic comes as the company readies itself to go public in what looks to be a series of blockbuster listings. Estimates from last year suggest an IPO could value the $852bn ChatGPT maker at up to $1trn. The company's start-up fund has backed the likes of Cursor, Harvey, Physical Intelligence and Kick. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.