Today we're announcing the close of Restive Fund III, a $45m fund, dedicated to investing in our belief that AI will unlock a new era of growth, productivity, and innovation in financial services. We strive to be the very first check backing the founders who are building this future.
We believe AI will add roughly $1 trillion in new revenue to the financial services industry over the next decade. Fund III is our concentrated, high-conviction bet on the founders going after that opportunity at its earliest, most formative moment.
Restive has run the same playbook since the firm was founded in 2018. We meet founders as early as we possibly can, often pre-incorporation and almost always pre-revenue. We write the first check. Then we work as an extension of the founding team, helping with hiring, facilitating partnerships across tech and financial services, building regulatory and policy relationships, and providing introductions to the downstream investors who will fund the rest of the journey.
If we have one strong opinion about where the industry is going, it's that the word "fintech" has stopped being useful.
What we see in our pipeline isn't a new generation of digitized financial products but rather something we've started calling AiFi, which is an AI-native financial services ecosystem in which the products, the teams, the workflows, and the unit economics are fundamentally different from what came before. Far from strapping language models onto legacy fintech infrastructure, AiFi companies are building entirely new categories: tools that let machines transact and negotiate with each other; systems that automate work humans used to do by hand in operations, underwriting, and compliance; and products that turn what used to be cost centers into revenue lines.
We've written more about specific pieces of this thesis — the permission layer, agentic commerce, the future of payments, and the machine layer of the internet. Read together, the picture they paint is of an industry where almost every part of the stack is genuinely up for grabs for the first time in the past 20+ years.
For founders and LPs who've worked with us before, Fund III's mechanics will look familiar:
Fund III is a $45M fund, which is about 15% larger than Fund II, allowing us to focus on the strategy that has enabled our success to date. The only meaningful difference from Fund II is that we're writing slightly larger initial checks. AI has compressed how much capital our founders need to reach meaningful traction, and in many cases, the earliest stage is the only point at which they need outside money at all. That makes it the right moment to build ownership and maximize our impact.
We’re looking for early technical teams taking big swings and building companies to take advantage of the new world that AI has enabled. A few of the companies we've already backed and have made public announcements, provide a sense of where this is going:
Each of these firms started with a tech-first answer to a question that financial services had been working around for decades, and each is using AI not as a feature but as the operating logic of the company itself.
Fund III brought together a mix of returning limited partners and new institutional investors, including endowments, global asset managers, and strategic partners across banking, insurance, payments, and technology. Many of them have been with us since Fund I; some are joining for the first time. To all of them: thank you for your conviction and for treating Restive as a long-term partner.
To our existing founders: thank you for making our entire mission a success across three funds and numerous other investment vehicles. It has been our privilege to work alongside you. You all are, literally, building the future.
To the founders we haven't met yet: if you're building something AI-native at the edges of financial services, we'd love to be your first call. The earliest moment is the moment we want to back you, and we have a fresh fund to do exactly that.
— The Restive team
© 2026 Restive®, Inc.