There is a version of financial services so well-built that nobody notices it is there. No app to open, no form to fill out, no branch to visit. A restaurant owner changes her menu, hires three people, opens a new location, and, somewhere in the background, her banking, lending, and payments infrastructure adjusts automatically to keep pace. The owner never thinks about her finances. She just runs her business.
That is not a distant vision for Bukie Adebo Umeano. It is the investment thesis she has been underwriting for the past four years as an early-stage investor at Anthemis Group. The firm calls it invisible finance, and Bukie has built her entire lens around it, from the structural advantages she believes in to the founders she backs to the unsexy infrastructure plays she gets genuinely excited about. The most powerful version of a thing, she argues, is often the one that quietly disappears.
Iron Sharpens Iron
Before Bukie was an investor, she was a builder. And before she was a builder, she was the second of four sisters, growing up in a household where imprecise thinking had consequences.
“If I say something that makes no sense, they’ll be like, wait, back up,” she said. “They challenge me, they push me. I got in a habit of a good back-and-forth, a healthy debate from a young age.” The four sisters have been called a cult by outsiders and, on at least one occasion, by their own mother, who reportedly turned away from the room after they showed her their welded-on matching bracelets. The bracelets do not come off. Neither, apparently, does the intellectual sparring.
That environment gave Bukie something that proved useful later: the ability to hold a position, defend it under pressure, and let it go when the argument runs out. She admits she still overqualifies her statements at times, a habit she has received feedback on, but the underlying instinct to stay open to being wrong has served her well in every role she has held. “Be open to being incorrect,” she said. “I learned that at a very young age.”
From that household, she moved through consulting and business school before landing in the fintech founding world. That operator experience is what eventually pulled her toward venture. She wanted to be, as she put it, the type of investor she wished she’d had.
What the Founder Side Gets Wrong About VCs
The transition from founder to investor came with a stack of recalibrations. Bukie describes them with the kind of specificity that only comes from having lived on both sides of the table.
As a founder, she could not understand why investors kept pushing on go-to-market so early. The product was good, the early users were there, so why all the questions about scale? On the other side, the logic snapped into focus quickly. “A lot of businesses do well in the first few years, and they reach this point where they can’t actually hit escape velocity,” she said. “Of course, investors try to de-risk that upfront.” If a portfolio keeps stalling at the same inflection point, the investor will start asking that question earlier next time.
Portfolio construction was the other blind spot. Bukie was direct about it: “There are so many great companies that we have not invested in, knowing they were great companies.” A strong business is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Ownership thresholds, fund model fit, stage, and check size all factor in before a check gets written. For founders, especially those who do not understand why a VC who loved their pitch still passed, that context matters.
She also noted that every party in a deal answers to someone. “Everybody has a boss,” she said. “Even the person who seems like they have power in a certain dynamic with you, they also have someone that they answer to.” For Bukie, that means the promises made to Anthemis’s limited partners shape every decision she makes as an investor.
The Moat Problem and the Network Effects Standard
At Anthemis, the early-stage fund focuses on pre-seed and seed companies operating in what the firm calls “high assurance” industries: financial services, healthcare, energy, and other categories that are heavily regulated and function as critical infrastructure. Anthemis has been investing in financial services for 15 years, and that experience in one complex regulated space turned out to map across others.
When it comes to evaluating defensibility in those businesses, Bukie is measured about what actually qualifies as a moat. She described most claims to moats as overstated. The one she takes seriously is genuine network effects, and she is precise about the definition. “Why does having company A make it easier, better, or more likely for company B to also be part of this network? Why does company B’s presence make it easier, better, or more likely for company C?” The standard is not just data accumulation. Every company accumulates data now. The question is whether data from one node improves the performance of every other node.
She looks for two things when assessing whether a business can build that kind of structure. First, reinforcing data loops: “Are there reinforcing data loops where one piece of information very closely launches you into the next piece of information?” Second, workflow integration. Businesses that embed themselves in where users already work, whether through technology, a physical environment, or an existing habit, are more likely to build something sticky. The further a product sits from the user’s actual workflow, the harder the network becomes to build and sustain.
The Invisible Finance Thesis, Wave by Wave
The thesis Anthemis developed for its current fund threads through all of this. Bukie described financial services innovation in three distinct waves.
Wave one was digitization: moving from the branch and the phone call to the mobile interface. Think neo-banks, early insurtech apps, the entire first generation of consumer fintech. Wave two was embedded finance: putting financial products at the exact point of need, so a business owner could access lending or payments from within her operating system rather than a separate banking app.
Wave three is what Anthemis is investing in now. “Your financial services are running in the background,” Bukie said. “You, as a business owner, are actually just making decisions.” In her framework, the imaginary founder she tracks through each wave, a restaurant owner she nicknamed “Rosie Restaurateur” in the fund deck, goes from opening a banking app in wave one, to accessing finance within her restaurant’s operating system in wave two, to simply running her business in wave three while the financial infrastructure adjusts behind her. “We don’t think about our electricity, do we? You just walk into a room, you turn on the lights, you never think twice about the fact that the lights work.”
The infrastructure thesis Anthemis is currently writing checks into reflects that directly. She pointed to investments in core banking, rebuilt from the ground up with AI, and in data orchestration platforms, reconstructed the same way. The other category she finds compelling sits at the coordination layer: businesses that unify the growing stack of AI agents and tools that companies are already using, helping them work together rather than creating parallel silos.
On the consumer side, she sees invisible finance building slowly. The business model is harder to crack, go-to-market is expensive, and the data needed to deliver real personalization takes time to accumulate. The founders she finds most interesting in that space are solving for that problem directly: finding ways to generate meaningful user data from day one rather than waiting months or years for the picture to develop.
Betting on the Unsexy
Bukie’s framework keeps returning to a counterintuitive place: the less visible the technology, the more interesting the investment. That applies to the infrastructure she funds, to the businesses she watches become embedded in daily life without anyone noticing, and to the founders who convince people to make decisions that look irrational from the outside because the logic is invisible until it is not.
She is also watching spaces that were historically overlooked become more compelling, specifically because automation cannot reach them. Physical goods, last-mile logistics, anything with a durable analog component: “There are pieces of this that are always going to be in the physical world and can’t be automated away. What automation do we build around that to kind of get us into the next era?”
For Bukie, that question is the right one to be asking. Not where the flashiest opportunity is, but where the work is that will still need to happen regardless of what the technology does next, and who is building the invisible infrastructure to support it.
This season is supported by SVB. Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Member FDIC. SVB is a trusted collaborator for the founders, pushing boundaries and the investors who back them. We’re proud to have them as our sponsor.
Please note, this podcast is for informational purposes and is not investment, financial, or legal advice. The views expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of SVB.
Read Bukie’s VC Profile
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