Gradient Labs

On 19th May, our CTO and co-Founder Neal Lathia will present on the panel: “Data You Can Defend: Building Decision-Grade Information” at the Banking Transformation Summit in London. 🎙️🇬🇧 Stop by the Gradient Labs booth to say hi to our team, and don’t miss the chance to ask Neal questions in the room.

Read more here: gradient-labs.ai/blog/introduci…

We’re working with more and more lenders across the UK, US, and Europe, and they all share the same challenge: lending is high-volume, time-sensitive, and compliance-heavy, which makes it difficult to scale. We’ve built an AI agent for lending that automates the borrower lifecycle, from application through to servicing and collections. Borrowers get fast, personalised support on every interaction, and lenders don’t have tickets sitting in queues. We’re already processing 100,000+ calls per month across our customer base, matching human recovery rates 1:1, and staying compliant at every step.

It’s a common challenge for lenders: a customer picks up an outbound call, actually wants to talk about their loan options, but doesn’t have enough time. To solve this challenge, SteadyPay launched a Voice AI agent that not only handles outreach, but can schedule a callback with a customer for any day or time that suits them. As a result, more customers are having calls on their schedule. This means better conversations, more empathy, increased financial clarity, and more trust in the lender. ☎️ Read the full story: eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQHkZ0

For AI voice agents in financial services support, good enough isn't good enough. That goes for every language our customers operate in. Today, we've partnered with @DeepgramAI to support Flux Multilingual, a conversational speech recognition model across 10 languages. So we can deliver safe, human-quality voice agents with sub-second latency, wherever our customers do business. Learn more here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0tT_LW0

@temporalio Read more about our AI voice agent in action: gradient-labs.ai/customers/stea…

ICYMI: you can catch our engineer Eliot Miller speaking at Replay 2026 in San Francisco next week. 🚀 He’ll talk about how we built a real-time voice agent with @temporalio that’s currently handling outreach calls for lending companies, inbound queries for banks, and more. Can’t make it to Replay 2026 but still want to see our voice agent in action? Check it out: eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQK6n0

Repayment outreach is one of the hardest parts of the lending lifecycle to scale. SteadyPay has proved that AI voice technology, deployed with the right compliance guardrails and empathetic tone, can handle these conversations at a volume no human team could match. Gradient Labs’ outbound AI voice agent handles ID verification, communicates outstanding balances, presents payment options, secures commitment dates, and logs outcomes directly to SteadyPay's systems. If a customer can't talk, the agent schedules a callback and initiates it automatically. After about a month of deployment, the SteadyPay team achieved: ☎️ 33,000 outbound calls per month ✅ 60% success rate after IDV 📈 +20% customer reactivation The key takeaway? Better financial outcomes for customers, stronger repayment performance for SteadyPay, and proof that Gradient Labs’ AI voice technology is ready for one of financial services’ most sensitive use cases. Read the full story: eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQGF10

Each month, @SpecterHQ uses its Investor Interest Signals to track funding velocity, hiring patterns, and investor signal strength in real time for growing companies. They've just named us one of the hottest startups in 2026 🔥: insights.tryspecter.com/hottest-startu…

Today we're unveiling our Borrower Lifecycle Agent: an AI agent built for lending that automates the entire borrower journey, from applications and collections, to the back-office work in between. It's already processing 100,000+ calls per month across our customer base with recovery rates matching humans 1:1 and 30x better compliance. Learn more here ⤵️ gradient-labs.ai/product/borrow…

We’re excited to welcome Chris Mackrill to the London office as our Brand Designer! 🇬🇧🎨 With over 10 years spent in the fintech and SaaS space at places like Monese and XYB, Chris brings a wealth of experience to the role and is excited to continue building the Gradient Labs look and feel. ✨ While we’re looking forward to what he creates in the office, we’re also hoping to get his tips on tennis, movies, and gaming… as well as what it’s like to travel with a 19 month old. ✈️ Interested in joining our team? Keep an eye out for opportunities: eu1.hubs.ly/H0t4Bv00

Biggest riser on the list 📈

Gradient Labs has never lost head-to-head. But after opening our NYC office, it was time to compete in a different kind of bake-off. So we sent CEO Dimitri Masin and Chief Scientist Danai Antoniou to the streets of Manhattan to settle our friendly office debate: 🇬🇧 London vs. 🗽 New York: which city has the best coffee, street food, and public transit? Watch to find out their verdict:

We’re building AI agents that give every bank customer their own AI account manager, with higher CSAT than human teams across text, email, and voice. Financial institutions don’t deploy systems like this on faith. To meet their bar, our agents must follow strict procedures, maintain state across interruptions, and respond quickly enough for voice while maintaining compliance. We use @OpenAI models because they meet all three at once: high instruction accuracy, low hallucination rates, and ~500 ms latency in production. Read our case study with here: eu1.hubs.ly/H0t7mkl0

🚀 Q: Any advice for those just starting out? A: The work world is changing fast, which can feel overwhelming early in your career. A few things to focus on: take ownership of your own learning, especially around AI. Learn the commercial dynamics of your business; decisions make more sense when you understand the incentives behind them. And stay curious and work hard, but don't stress about things taking longer than you hoped. Most meaningful progress in a career happens over years, not months.

📣 Q: Are there any mentors or communities you’d like to shout out? A: Alma Angels is doing great work to invest in startups with female founders, and they’re making meaningful progress in pushing diversity forward in this space. I also value London COO Roundtable run by Divinia Knowles FCMA. It consistently creates a meaningful space for thoughtful and practical conversations. Both communities are great examples of how supportive networks can have a real impact on people’s careers and on the broader ecosystem.

This International Women’s Month, we celebrated the women in our orbit across finance and AI with a digest of honest career conversations. To close us out: Rona Ruthen, a startup operator and advisor helping companies integrate AI into real operational workflows. 🧵