YC-backed startup Eloquent AI has raised $7.4 million in seed funding to build AI-powered customer service solutions tailored for the financial services industry. The company, co-founded by Tugce Bulut and Aldo Lipani, aims to automate complex, regulated workflows such as customer onboarding and card unfreezing using a proprietary large language model called Oratio. Bulut, a second-time founder, previously co-founded Streetbees, a market research startup that recently went into administration and laid off all staff. She says her experience and the strong investor interest in vertical-specific AI startups helped drive the success of Eloquent’s fundraising round. The seed round was led by Foundation Capital and included participation from EJF Ventures, Duke Capital Partners, Zeno Ventures, and Y Combinator. The funding closed in just three days and was 12 times oversubscribed, according to Bulut. She attributes the strong demand to her track record and growing market interest in AI models trained specifically for regulated industries. Eloquent AI’s product works by analyzing screen recordings of human agents performing tasks, then replicating those actions autonomously. It includes built-in guardrails set by technical teams and logs every action for audit compliance—critical in highly regulated sectors like banking and insurance. The company currently has 10 employees and 10 clients, including Cleo, OakNorth Bank, and insurance provider Vouch. It also has a waitlist of 154 companies. Eloquent claims to have generated $500,000 in annual recurring revenue within four weeks of launching. Revenue is generated through a credit-based system where clients pay only when the AI successfully completes a task. The company plans to use the new funds to expand its engineering team in San Francisco and enhance capabilities like sanctions screening—used to prevent financial transactions with blacklisted entities. Eloquent AI intends to expand beyond banking into insurance and trading, each with its own specialized version of the Oratio model. The company plans to raise a Series A round early next year.