Promenaut launches with HSBC as design partner and investor

By Divya Shah

Promenaut has launched its enterprise AI orchestration platform, announcing HSBC as both a design partner and strategic investor as the company brings agent-enabled workflows to regulated industries. 

The company has raised $8.9 million in total funding to date, including an investment from HSBC. As part of the partnership, David Rice, Chief AI Officer at HSBC, will join Promenaut’s board. 

Promenaut is already being used within HSBC’s operations, where the platform supports agent orchestration across selected workflows. Current use cases include business case evaluation and pre-coding activities within the software development lifecycle. 

The platform is designed to help enterprises deploy and manage AI agents within governance frameworks suited to highly regulated environments. It includes capabilities such as permission controls, audit trails and human-in-the-loop oversight, enabling organisations to monitor how AI agents are authorised, execute tasks and generate outcomes. 

David Rice, Chief AI Officer at HSBC, said the focus is not simply on deploying more AI, but on ensuring its use remains controlled, accountable and transparent. 

Promenaut’s technology is model-agnostic and can operate across different cloud environments, allowing organisations to integrate AI capabilities without being tied to a specific model provider or infrastructure platform. 

The collaboration forms part of HSBC’s broader strategy to explore the responsible adoption of AI across the organisation. As a design partner, the bank is providing operational feedback based on real-world deployment of the platform in selected workflows. 

According to the company, demand for governance and orchestration capabilities is increasing as enterprises seek to move beyond AI experimentation and scale agent-enabled processes while maintaining compliance, oversight and risk controls. 

Promenaut was co-founded by Stephen Murphy, who has more than 25 years of experience delivering technology transformation programmes for financial institutions. The firm’s initial focus is on financial services, where regulatory requirements and operational risks create a strong need for auditable AI frameworks. 

The company platform is designed to address a key challenge facing enterprises: enabling AI agents to perform meaningful work while ensuring every action remains traceable, measurable and subject to human oversight. As financial institutions increasingly introduce AI into core business processes, orchestration and governance tools are emerging as critical components of enterprise AI infrastructure.