Banking back offices still run on a surprising amount of manual labour, especially in regulated workflows where “move fast” can quickly turn into “compliance risk.” Switzerland-based Porters is pitching itself as an alternative to legacy BPO setups and rigid RPA scripts, using autonomous, human-in-the-loop workflows built for complex, highly regulated processes such as account seizures, chargebacks, and insolvency coordination.

The startup has now raised €2.7 million in pre-seed funding to speed up product development and expand its suite of what it describes as “mission-critical services” . The round was led by Earlybird VC, with Seedcamp also participating, alongside a set of industry angels . Porters did not disclose its valuation.

Why Porters thinks now is the moment?

Porters’ core argument is that some of the most important banking workflows remain painfully hands-on because regulation makes them hard to automate safely. In the company’s words, across European banks and fintechs, processes like account seizures, chargebacks and insolvency handling are still “highly manual” due to regulatory complexity, and often involve “dozens of touchpoints per case,” multiple systems, and turnaround times that can stretch from days into weeks.

That delay, Porters says, doesn’t just cost time. It can create compliance risk, customer friction, and high operational cost and as volumes scale, early design partners told the company these processes can swallow a disproportionate share of operations headcount.

Porters’ pitch is that its model, AI-native workflows with human oversight, lets teams move complex cases faster while keeping traceability and safeguards intact.

The founders’ angle: “we’ve seen this movie”

The company traces its origin to frustration built up inside fintech operations. Porters says its founders spent years watching back-office work stay stuck in spreadsheets, email-based case handling, and slow approval chains, even at institutions considered innovative.

The founding team includes Konstantin Kotulla, who previously led go-to-market strategy at Upvest; Christopher Barth, who worked on regulated-product integrations for major financial institutions; and Dr. Michael John, an ETH Zurich PhD who has worked on applied machine learning and large-scale tech transformations.

What the product is focusing on first?

At launch, Porters is targeting two specific workflows: account seizure and insolvency management . The company describes them as high-volume and time-sensitive processes that directly affect customer trust, regulatory standing, and financial exposure.

The platform is positioned as a way to improve speed and “context enrichment,” letting internal teams focus on exceptions rather than repetitive case processing.

What’s next: deployments, more use cases, hiring

Over the next 12 months, Porters says it plans to:

• launch production deployments with “measurable reductions in processing time and manual effort,”
• expand beyond its initial use cases into other regulated back-office processes,
• grow its engineering and operations team across Europe.

Kotulla framed the ambition as moving beyond task automation to something closer to capacity unlock: “We’re solving this by building an AI-native service that doesn’t just automate tasks, but truly allows scaling without adding headcount, while maintaining the resilience and compliance that financial institutions require,” he said.

Earlybird’s Tim Rehder argued the opportunity is hiding in plain sight: operational complexity that “scales exponentially with growth.” He said Porters’ “AI-first, compliance-ready” approach positions it to serve innovative financial institutions .

In fintech, the flashy part is usually the customer-facing app. But the real friction and the real cost, often sits behind the scenes, where regulated processes can’t be rushed and mistakes are expensive. Porters is betting that this is exactly where AI can deliver value, provided it comes with guardrails, auditability, and a human in the loop.

And if it works, the upside isn’t just speed. It’s the promise of a back office that scales like software, without turning compliance into a casualty.

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