Hedge Fund to AI Samantha McBride swapped a lucrative career in finance for the start-up world. Now, she's using AI to revolutionise the financial advisory industry - making it faster, more efficient, and accessible.

From managing hedge funds to founding Ani Tech, Samantha McBride's journey into AI began with a New Year's resolution and a love for coding. Now, with nearly all of Ani Tech's AI layer built by McBride herself, she's transforming financial advisory through technology. Here, she talks about the challenges of building an AI workforce, the future of financial advice, and her role in leading the charge for female founders in AI. Entrepreneur UK finds out more…

You went from hedge fund manager to AI start-up founder. What was the tipping point that made you switch careers?
I swapped a lucrative career in banking for the rollercoaster ride of start-up life because I fell in love with coding. The financial advice industry is fundamentally broken for the average person as it simply costs too much money to serve ordinary people effectively. I realised that AI was going to transform the industry in a way that could be really positive. So I decided to build something that could use AI agents to make financial advice more accessible and efficient. In lots of ways being a hedge fund manager is great practice for being a founder. Long hours, high pressure, high stress - all conditions that every founder can relate to.

How has your background in finance influenced the development of AI agents for financial advisers?
My background means I understand the operational heaviness of the industry. Today, advisers spend up to 26 hours onboarding a single new client, dealing with everything from gathering pension details to writing regulated suitability letters. Because I know these workflows intimately, I didn't just build a chatbot; I built an entire AI workforce to cut 20 hours of manual work out of that process. And this isn't just about speed. Efficiency in finance is about compliance and scalability. That's why our agents don't just "help", they monitor progress, flag risks, and execute tasks autonomously.

Coding with your mum as a New Year's resolution is an unusual start. How did that moment shape your path into tech?
This was the pivotal moment that started my journey to become a tech founder. It started as a New Year's resolution with my mum and aunt to sign up for an online Python course. From that moment, I fell in love with coding. It wasn't just a hobby; it empowered me to understand technology deeply. It's what I wanted to dedicate my career to and I have now personally coded nearly 100% of Ani Tech's AI layer.

As one of the few women in AI, what challenges have you faced, and how have you navigated them?
There is a real energy and renewed sense of optimism about homegrown AI companies in the UK and across Europe. But none of the breakout success stories from the last 12 months have a female founder. There is a new wave of female AI founders coming through and I'm proud to be part of that. It's important that women are writing the code and guardrails for AI technology as well as men. For me personally, being a woman hasn't really been an issue. I came from a finance background, so I was used to male-dominated environments long before I got into tech. If anything, I think the less talked-about barrier is class – the tech and VC world is still heavily dominated by people who went to private school, and state school kids like me don't arrive with a ready-made network. I navigate this by sticking to my own leadership style. I don't try to fit the "tech bro" stereotype; I'm just calm, analytical, and data-driven. And let the results speak for themselves.

What's been the toughest lesson in scaling your AI start-up?
The toughest lesson was accepting that you cannot "plug" true AI agents into old infrastructure. I wanted to create an AI workforce that financial advisors could use, but realised that our old platform couldn't make them work. We had to make the difficult decision to rebuild our entire stack from scratch to support a fully agentic architecture. It taught me that while many companies are "agent-washing", marketing simple chatbots as intelligent agents, building a system where AI workers actually talk to each other and self-correct requires a completely different technical foundation.

Where do you see AI in financial advising going?
I think 2026 is the year when financial advisors that aren't using AI will really start to get left behind. The functionality and capabilities of AI are reaching a level where they can make a massive difference to the day to day work of advisors and the quality of service received by their clients. For financial advice, AI is now able to analyse and automate a significant portion of the workflows to support clients. If you take onboarding new clients as one example, that is a process that historically takes 26 hours per client. AI can automate so much of that process that it takes just 6 hours for a human to complete the process. That means financial advisors can start offering a service that is 75% cheaper to deliver. We are moving toward an era of proactive advice, where AI doesn't just wait for instructions but alerts advisers when a client falls off track or needs attention. Ultimately, humans will focus on the relationship, while AI orchestrates the work.