Moment, the fintech company founded by a cohort of former Citadel Securities quantitative traders and researchers, has raised $78 million. The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Avra. The company last raised $36 million in July 2025.

Moment builds infrastructure that allows wealth management firms to deploy AI agents for fixed-income and equities trading. In the past year, it signed Edward Jones, LPL Financial, and Hightower Advisors as partners. These are not small accounts: Edward Jones manages $2.1 trillion in client assets, LPL oversees approximately $1.7 trillion, and Hightower manages more than $175 billion.

“The largest financial institutions know they need to deploy agents, but the infrastructure to deploy them safely and effectively hasn’t existed,” CEO and co-founder Dylan Parker said. “We built that operating system from the ground up, with a unified data model and regulatory-grade controls so AI can finally do real work in investment management.”

The pitch is infrastructure, not intelligence. Moment is not building its own large language model. It is building the compliance, data, and execution layer that sits between frontier AI models and the regulated environment in which wealth managers operate. The distinction matters because financial services firms cannot simply plug ChatGPT or Claude into their trading systems without audit trails, regulatory controls, and integration with existing market data infrastructure.

Anthropic has been pitching financial services firms directly, unveiling specialised AI agents designed for tasks like trade compliance, portfolio analysis, and client reporting. The competitive dynamic is layered: Anthropic provides the reasoning model, but firms like Moment provide the regulated infrastructure that makes those models deployable in production.

Russ Tipper, principal and head of products and solutions at Edward Jones, framed the opportunity clearly. “AI is going to be a defining capability for the next era of wealth management,” he said. “The firms that get it right will be the ones that pair it with the right infrastructure.”

OpenAI launched its own personal finance tools this month, connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid for consumer-facing financial advice. Moment operates at the institutional end of the same spectrum. The consumer and institutional approaches will likely converge, but for now they represent different bets on where AI-powered finance creates the most value.

The former Citadel pedigree is a deliberate signal. Citadel Securities is one of the most technically sophisticated trading operations in the world. Building a startup with alumni from that environment tells prospective clients that the team understands both the technology and the regulatory constraints that make financial services AI harder than general-purpose AI.

Anthropic recently finalised a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed Claude inside portfolio companies of the world’s largest private equity firms. That deal and Moment’s raise point in the same direction: the financial services industry is moving from evaluating AI to deploying it, and the companies that control the infrastructure layer between the model and the trade will capture a disproportionate share of the value.

Legal

Cox Media Group allegedly sold a bogus AI-powered snoopfest service

It’s not every day a titan of industry pays six figures to settle claims it lied about spying on users via their smart home devices, but the FTC said that it would conclude the case against TV, radio, and advertising giant Cox Media Group (CMG) if it does.

It would also need to make certain commitments around making misrepresentations. CMG, together with two smaller marketing companies, New Hampshire-based MindSift LLC and 1010 Digital Works LLC in Wisconsin, is alleged to have misled customers in advertising a supposed AI-powered service.

This marketing product, called “Active Listening,” was pitched as a novel algorithm that could take snippets from user conversations, supposedly overheard by their smart home devices, and use them to generate targeted ads to other users in specific geographic regions.

The FTC alleged that these companies were, in essence, claiming to be selling data they said they’d gathered by spying on users, who were said to have given their consent to all of this.

In reality, claimed the watchdog, the trio was instead selling lists of email addresses bought from data brokers “at a significant markup,” the FTC said.

There had been no listening in on smart devices or conversations of any kind, there was no voice data being used at all, and consumers had not given their consent to the advertised service, the regulator went on to allege.

“Not only did the product these companies marketed not do what they claimed it did, but they also misled potential customers by claiming consumers had opted into this service when it’s clear they did not,” said Christopher Mufarrige, director at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. 

“It is a basic rule of business that you need to be honest with your customers, and these companies failed to do that.”

According to the complaints leveled at the three companies, in saying that users had consented to be enrolled in its Active Listening service, what they actually meant was that users had agreed to the terms of service when downloading or using certain applications.

The FTC said that this is not the same as providing consent for their day-to-day conversations being snooped on by an algorithm running in their smart home devices.

Further, even if Active Listening did work as the trio described, it would have violated Section 5 of the FTC Act because of the companies’ flawed consent model.

CMG will pay the vast majority of the settlement sum, $880,000, while the two smaller companies will each pay $25,000. The funds will be used to compensate customers who bought into Active Listening’s marketing, the FTC said.

All three companies are also barred from misrepresenting the features of their marketing services, collecting voice data, and geographic targeting capabilities.

The Register contacted CMG for a response. ®

Soundcore, which you may have heard does both audio and video now, has launched another pair of headphones in the Liberty 5 Pro and Liberty 5 Pro Max.

Another pair of true wireless earbuds, you might think what’s interesting about that? Well, in a first for Soundcore, this true wireless pair are the first two products to features Anker’s co-developed Thus AI chip, which it claims can offer “Whisper Clear” calls.

How so? By utilising a 10-sensor matrix that can separated the speaker’s voice from background noise, combined with eight microphones to capture ambient noise and two bone conduction sensors that can detect skull vibrations, the Thus AI chip is said to ensure “clear voice pickup even in noisy environments.” Interesting.

Of course there have been improvements in other areas for both the Liberty 5 Pro and Max efforts, with ANC improved up to two times over previous generations, while the Liberty 5 Pro Max also features AI Note-Taker for recording meetings without having to reach for your phone.

As you can see, Anker/Soundcore is delving deeply into AI for its latest products, with it involved in seemingly every aspect of the two earbuds that have just been announced.

Another area where AI is used is with voice interaction, with 20 built-in commands that allow users to adjust volume, answer or hang up phone calls, skip tracks and change ANC modes.

Speaking of ANC, there’s a transparency mode for paying attention to your surroundings, and what Soundcore is dubbing its Easy Chat feature, where audio is paused when the headphones sense you’re speaking.

Both earbuds offer up to 6.5 hours of playback with noise cancelling on, and 28 hours in total with the charging case. Bluetooth 6.1 is supported, as is Google Fast Pair, Apple’s Find My (in case you lose the earbuds somewhere), and Bluetooth multipoint for connecting to not just two devices but three. What’s the main difference between the two? The Liberty 5 Pro Max’s charging case has a touch screen.

The Liberty 5 Pro is available now, priced at $169.99 / £149.99 / €179.99, putting within the midrange area of the market. Colours include blue, white, black and pink.

The flagship Liberty 5 Pro Max is the more expensive at $229.99 / £199.99 / €249.99. Colours are a choice of Titanium-Gold and black.

Look out for our review of both headphones in the coming weeks.