UK-founded capital markets AI software provider Semeris has raised £3.5m led by growth capital fund Puma Growth Partners, which provides lending to SMEs across all sectors in the UK.
Semeris was founded in 2020 by Peter Jasko, former head of JPMorgan’s European collateralised loan obligation (CLO) team, and Sam Daroczy, co-founder and former CEO of Verba Technologies, a fintech company acquired by Verint Systems.
Semeris combines large language models with a ‘human in the loop’ approach to analysing complex legal documents in the debt and structured finance markets.
The company offers a library of structured finance transactions covering CLOs, asset-backed securities, mortgage-backed securities, leveraged loans, and high-yield bonds. It has built a repository of over a million analyst-verified data points, forming a reference library for quality assurance and AI training.
We’re told that four of the global top five CLO law firms use Semeris to answer “What’s market?” questions and speed up drafting. Semeris says its libraries can deliver a 10x-faster deal review process, and customers report significantly faster turnaround times on ad hoc, market-wide inquiries, reducing research timelines from months to days.
Jasko said of Puma: “Their investment will accelerate our expansion beyond CLOs and ABS/MBS into other asset classes and document types, such as credit agreements in leveraged loans and private credit, equipping finance professionals with AI-powered tools that drastically reduce turnaround times and tackle challenges previously out of reach.”