London-based startup Nous has raised $17 million to expand internationally, as nearly 250,000 UK households now use its AI agent to manage bills, switch providers and automate everyday household administration.
The round was backed by Heartcore Capital and existing investor Mosaic Ventures, alongside Chalfen Ventures, Joyance Partners and Bain Future Back Ventures. Angel investors include Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield and Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman.
The new funding will finance international expansion and extend the agent into additional financial services. Home insurance is planned in the coming months, with Marsh also targeting savings accounts, better interest rates and credit card debt consolidation. The company has not disclosed which international markets it intends to enter first.
Before this latest round, Nous had raised approximately $10 million in venture funding, so this takes it to a total of $27m.
Founded by Greg Marsh, who previously sold luxury accommodation marketplace onefinestay to Accor for $200 million, Nous is betting that consumers will increasingly delegate household spending decisions to AI agents rather than comparison websites.
Its agent finds cheaper deals on energy, broadband, mobile contracts and car insurance, switches providers, cancels subscriptions and identifies expensive renewal terms. It also handles family calendars, appointments and other routine tasks.
Since leaving beta in early 2025, Nous says it’s AI agent service has grown around 25% month-on-month and now manages more than £685 million ($917 million) in annual household spending. It claims average savings of £734 per household, with a new household joining every minute.
Speaking to the Pathfounders Podcast, Marsh said the company's central proposition was not simply automating tasks, but taking responsibility for them continuously.
"Fundamentally, what none of those tools do is they don't really own the responsibility," he said, referring to general-purpose AI assistants.
"I tend to think if it works really well, this class of tools almost becomes invisible. It should exist in your life the same way as your plumbing does, right? You don't want to think about where the water goes when it goes down the plughole. It just works."
Nous is entering an increasingly competitive market for consumer AI agents. In the US, Pine raised a $25 million Series A to develop an agent that negotiates bills, cancels subscriptions and handles refunds. ScribeUp recently raised a $13 million Series A to expand its AI-powered recurring bill management platform, which operates through banking apps.
Meanwhile, Rocket Money launched Rowan, an Anthropic-powered financial agent that monitors spending, negotiates bills and cancels subscriptions. In the UK, Alfred has attracted investment from Liberty Global and others to bundle household services including energy, broadband, mobile and insurance under a single membership.
The emerging battleground between these kinds of companies is whether AI agents can move beyond recommending cheaper services to actually purchasing, switching and managing them on consumers' behalf. And they will also find compeition from Frontier model providers like Muse from Meta, Dots from OpenAI, and GrokBot from Xai.
Nous is attempting to differentiate itself through reliability and regulatory compliance. Rather than relying entirely on large language models, it combines AI with deterministic, rules-based systems for sensitive financial transactions, including insurance brokerage, where it operates under FCA regulation.
"If you're managing someone's financial decision making bills or you're managing an insurance brokerage transaction, being usually right or being probably correct isn't good enough," Marsh said.
"You've got to be able to commit to the user that it's going to work basically every time. And if it doesn't work, that there's a human in the loop, and then you see the exceptions and they can jump in and fix it."
Marsh also said that Nous is increasingly migrating from frontier AI models to cheaper open-weight alternatives as its internal systems mature. Customers can also interact with the agent through WhatsApp rather than a dedicated interface.
He said the company's operational volumes had increased twentyfold over the past year without increasing the size of its operations and customer service team.
"The vast majority of our user interactions are automated and are passed through APIs," he said.
Nous operates a freemium model alongside paid subscriptions, with payments from suppliers also contributing to its economics. Marsh said the company does not sell customer data or rely on advertising, arguing that its primary obligation is to households rather than service providers.
Marsh believes the changes underway could fundamentally reshape consumer commerce, particularly the recurring payments that households frequently leave unattended.
"My belief is very straightforwardly that what we're about to experience over the next 5 or 10 years will change commerce as much or more than the internet," he said.
"It's going completely to change the way that we interact with the services that we buy and the money that we spend in our system."
The wider implication that comparison websites and intermediaries that currently dominate household financial decisions are in deep trouble. Rather than consumers searching for cheaper deals, AI agents will increasingly do the searching, negotiating and switching automatically.