Mouro closes $400M fund as Santander backs AI and blockchain bets

Santander-backed Mouro Capital has closed its third fund at $400 million, with the new vehicle targeting startups at the intersection of AI, blockchain, capital markets and wealth management.

Summary

• Mouro Capital said its third fund closed at $400 million, taking total capital commitments since launch to more than $1 billion.
• Longtime backer Santander participated in the fund and remains central to the firm’s investment platform.
• Mouro’s focus includes AI-enabled finance, programmable money and blockchain infrastructure, including prior backing for M^ZERO.

Mouro Capital has closed its third fund at $400 million, extending a venture strategy that now explicitly targets the overlap between AI, blockchain, financial infrastructure, capital markets and wealth management as legacy financial systems are rebuilt around software and automation.

The new vehicle, backed again by Santander, pushes Mouro’s total capital commitments above $1 billion since launch in 2015, according to coverage from Vestbee, which said the London-based investor plans to keep backing companies modernizing payments, lending, insurance, compliance and core banking rails.

That investment thesis is not vague futurism. In separate reporting, Tech Funding News said Mouro has already made seven investments from the new fund, including ElevenLabs and Sakana AI, while emphasizing that the firm is now focused on “AI-native interfaces, stablecoins, and decentralized finance” as key building blocks for the next generation of financial services.

AI and blockchain converge

The blockchain angle is real, not decorative. On its own portfolio, Mouro lists M^ZERO as an investment and describes it as “decentralised stablecoin infrastructure that enables institutions to seamlessly transfer value,” which makes clear the fund is still willing to back crypto plumbing rather than just AI software wrapped in fintech language.

That matters because the market is increasingly rewarding firms that can sit between regulated finance and autonomous software systems. Pathfounders reported that Mouro is looking closely at governance, risk and compliance, capital markets, wealth management, payments infrastructure and stablecoins, which is another way of saying the fund sees the future financial stack as both AI-mediated and blockchain-aware.

The institutional logic is straightforward: if money, compliance and advisory workflows are becoming machine-assisted, then the systems moving value and verifying identity have to become programmable too. Mouro appears to be betting that AI will change the interface layer of finance while blockchain and stablecoin infrastructure reshape settlement, custody and transfer underneath it.

Capital keeps moving into the theme

The broader funding environment supports that view, even if some of the numbers in your prompt were off. Catena Labs disclosed an $18 million seed round led by a16z crypto, not $30 million, to build what it called the “first fully regulated AI-native financial institution.”

Meanwhile, Accel said it led Viktor’s $75 million Series A, describing the company as an “AI coworker” that operates inside Slack and Microsoft Teams and had already reached a $15 million revenue run rate after just 10 weeks.

In that context, Mouro’s new fund looks less like a routine venture close and more like another institutional vote that the next serious winners in fintech will be built where AI automation, digital asset infrastructure and regulated financial distribution start to overlap.