Akbank AG, the German subsidiary of Turkey’s leading bank Akbank TAS, has successfully completed Phase 1 of its core banking transformation, to the leading SaaS cloud banking platform Mambu. The transformation was delivered in close partnership with Innovance, Mambu’s strategic technology partner.

The milestone marks a full transition away from Akbank AG’s legacy core system for its Retail and Private segments, with all customers and accounts in these business lines now operating on Mambu’s composable, API-first cloud-native core banking platform.

Operating under the supervision of Germany’s financial regulatory authority, BaFin, Akbank AG’s transformation represents a significant example of a regulated European bank modernising its core banking infrastructure through a structured, phased migration strategy.

The new architecture, hosted on Microsoft Azure, combines:

• Mambu as the core banking foundation. Its API-first architecture enabled the bank to integrate
  easily with partners and reduce operational complexity, lowering maintenance effort and improving
  resilience.
• Core+ layer: This custom implementation layer communicates with Mambu and other integration services, acting as the central orchestration and business logic layer.
• Implementation partner: Innovance playing a key role in integrating the Core+ architecture with Mambu to enable scalable product modelling, transaction validation and limit management and standardised integration patterns aligned with Akbank AG’s target architecture.

A standout milestone was the delivery of the Limit Proposal Application in 2022, which enabled Akbank AG to launch a digital corporate credit approval process in just four months. The fully integrated ecosystem now includes core banking, accounting, payments, digital channels (web and mobile), wealth management back office, document management, and enterprise financial crime detection components. The modular approach allowed Akbank AG to adjust parameters—such as pricing, fees, and interest settings—directly through configuration rather than code, significantly reducing implementation time.

With Retail and Private Banking now live, the next phase of the transformation covering Corporate Banking and Lending is underway. This next stage will focus on complex lending requirements and the integration of several new systems using Mambu’s modular service structure.

“The industry is undergoing rapid transformation, and customers increasingly expect agility and seamless digital experiences,” said Osman Kara, Core Banking Technologies Vice President at Akbank AG. “With the successful completion of Phase 1 on Mambu, and in close collaboration with Innovance, we have modernised our core banking foundation and established a scalable architecture to support our next phase of growth.”

“Mambu is proud to have powered the transformation of Akbank AG. A show of our strength in the region, as well as our continued partnership with Innovance, this project will transform the banking capabilities of the region, as well as the offerings from Akbank AG. We look forward to the next phase of transformation.” says Mark Geneste, Chief Revenue Officer - Mambu

Yusuf Ürey - Innovance Founder & CEO: “At Innovance, we approach core banking transformation as a long-term capability shift rather than a system replacement. Together with Mambu, we have established a modern technology backbone for Akbank AG that enables continuous evolution, allowing the bank to respond faster to changing customer expectations and market dynamics.”

Mehmet Ali Özcan - Innovance Germany - Managing Director: “In this transformation, we developed the Core+ layer end-to-end to manage business logic, integrations and validations independently, while ensuring seamless interaction with Mambu’s platform. This approach allowed us to simplify system interactions and create a more adaptable and scalable foundation for future banking services.”

The successful migration strengthens Mambu’s footprint in the DACH region and, together with Innovance’s engineering and delivery capabilities, demonstrates the viability of replacing legacy core systems within regulated European banking environments.

The UK government has selected Cosine, the British AI company whose models have outperformed OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and DeepSeek on independent coding benchmarks for two consecutive years, as one of the first partners in its newly launched £500 million Sovereign AI programme. 

Cosine was founded in 2022 by Alistair Pullen — who has been building AI products since 2018 and shipped his first iOS app at age nine — and Yang Li, who previously scaled Mobike to 220 million users across four continents before its $55 billion acquisition. A Y Combinator graduate, the company has raised $8 million from investors including Lakestar, SOMA Capital, and Gaingels.

As both an AI lab and a product company, Cosine builds and owns its models, trains its agents, and deploys the full stack. Its platform supports more than 38 programming languages, including Fortran, COBOL, Ada, and Verilog — purpose-built for the legacy codebases that underpin Britain's defence systems, nuclear infrastructure, and financial services backbone. 

It is the only end-to-end sovereign AI coding platform built, owned, and operated entirely in Britain.

Cosine is already engaged across UK defence primes and critical national infrastructure operators, including organisations involved in the UK's nuclear deterrent programmes and next-generation defence platforms. For organisations operating at the classified edge of British industry, sending code to a foreign-managed server is often legally and operationally prohibited. Cosine was built for that constraint: its platform deploys entirely within a customer's own infrastructure, without an internet connection, without data leaving the building, and without reliance on foreign-managed models.

Through the UK’s AI Research Resource (AIRR), the Sovereign AI Fund has awarded Cosine 500,000 GPU hours on Isambard-AI — one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe — worth millions of pounds in infrastructure value. 

For the first time, this makes it possible to build and deploy a fully sovereign AI model entirely on British soil, with no foreign dependency at any stage. In addition, the Sovereign AI Fund’s venture arm has secured the option to participate in Cosine's next funding round.

"Cursor and Claude Code are outstanding products. They are also legally off the table for a lot of our customers," said Alistair Pullen, CEO and co-founder of Cosine.

"The moment your work touches classified infrastructure, you need an AI that lives entirely inside your walls. We built Cosine that way from the start, because retrofitting security onto a cloud product is not the same thing, and the people we work with know the difference.

What we are building now goes further: a truly British AI lab, producing sovereign models for Britain's most critical use cases, owned and controlled by the UK, for the benefit of the UK."

"For two years we've been telling defence primes and critical infrastructure operators that we can do what no one else can: air-gapped, on-premise, trained on the legacy code that runs Britain's most sensitive systems," said Yang Li, COO and co-founder.

"The one thing we couldn't say was that the model itself was trained on sovereign infrastructure. The AIRR grant completes that picture. The UK should be an AI maker, not an AI taker - and this is what that looks like in practice."  

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Today, Unconventional Ventures (UV) announced the second close of Unconventional Ventures Fund II.

In a challenging global climate — marked by economic uncertainty and tightening capital markets — this close represents more than a fundraising milestone. It signals strong conviction that backing underinvested founders building scalable, category-defining companies remains a resilient and forward-looking investment thesis.

The firm welcomed new investors joining Fund II, including Wire Group, Investinor, FÆRCH OG DØTRE, and Merete Lundbye Møller.

Investinor, a Norwegian government-backed venture capital investor, is committed to identifying and supporting companies with the potential to grow into world-leading businesses. The firm continues its partnership with Unconventional Ventures, having been a valued investor since Fund I.

Wire Group, a Netherlands-based impact investing firm, is known for its focus on diversity and inclusion, as well as measurable social and environmental impact.

Ronald Janse, Chief Conscious Capital at Wire Group, commented:

“We’re thrilled to join the UV team in their second fund. The fund’s thesis is a perfect match for our Wire Thrive Fund II: investing in underrepresented founders who are building meaningful, future-shaping companies. UV’s rare combination of inclusion and impact—paired with an exceptional team—makes us genuinely excited to participate in this closing.”

The firm also expressed gratitude to its existing Fund II LPs and its broader community of family offices, whose continued support underpins its mission.

Unconventional Ventures maintains that the next generation of scalable, sustainable companies will emerge from ambitious founders who have too often been overlooked, and remains committed to identifying and backing them while contributing to a more equitable and sustainable future.