When looking for a way to unite AI and Wall Street, Mike Taro Wehmeyer, CEO of AI financial services firm Taktile, decided to go literally. Earlier this week, Taktile placed a 300-pound statue of a lobster — a symbol now associated with artificial intelligence due to Moltbook’s popular OpenClaw clients — in front of Wall Street’s famous Charging Bull for a symbolic confrontation.
The trick quickly spread. Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, chimed inAs he did Kate RocheChief Marketing Officer at OpenAI. After the lobster was whisked away several hours later in Manhattan’s financial district, Wehmeyer revealed Taktile as the organizer. This event coincided with the company’s launch of Taktile Labs, a new research unit focused on developing artificial intelligence standards and frameworks for financial institutions.
“Our mission at Taktile is actually to bring AI safely into banks,” Weheimer told the Observer. “Now, clients can come to Wall Street and actually work with the bull, not against it.”
Taktile, with offices in New York, Berlin and London, was founded by Wehmeyer and his Harvard colleague Maximilian Eber. The duo later worked together as machine learning engineers at QuantCo, where they built enterprise AI products. They quickly realized that the highly regulated financial sector presented unique barriers to the deployment of such tools – a problem they set out to solve with Taktile.
Founded in 2020, Taktile offers an AI platform designed for use cases such as onboarding, credit, fraud detection, and compliance. It counts more than 200 financial institutions as clients, including digital bank Monzo and insurance company Allianz. Backed by Y Combinator, the startup has raised $79 million from Balderton Capital, Index Ventures, and Tiger Global.
By late 2025, Wehmeyer noticed something new: models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic were completing complex tasks faster and better than humans. “At that time, 2026 will be the year that AI will actually enter financial services,” he said. But for this widespread adoption to happen, banks need a reliable source to explain the rapid development of AI
This vision inspired the lobster sculpture, a marketing tool for Taktile Labs. The new institute aims to make AI agents more reliable and explainable through research and measurement. While current benchmarks test AI performance in areas like mathematics or medicine, Wehmeyer noted that financial services still lack vetted metrics for tasks like credit underwriting and transaction monitoring.
To make its point clear, Tactile commissioned New York-based artist Andrew Logan to create the nine-foot-tall sculpture in just ten days. Composed of a combination of fiberglass and metal, the piece is finished in bronze to reflect the charging bull designed by Arturo Di Modica, a fixture in the Financial District since 1989.
“With Taktile Labs, we want to focus on one question: What will it take for financial institutions to confidently deploy AI in high-risk decisions?” Weimer said. The results of the initiative will be public and guided by a research board that includes Ben Liebald, vice president of engineering at Harvey; Wagner Abreu, Executive Director, Credit Risk at Bradesco; and Jonas Neal, engineering lead for asynchronous agents at Cursor.
The financial services industry, which will spend $58 billion on AI in 2025, This spending is expected to increase to $97 billion by 2027According to Statista website. However, AI adoption continues to lag behind technical progress. Taktile joins a crowded field of competitors, including Provenir, Sperta and Scienaptic, all vying to fill this gap.
After watching other industries being transformed by AI, Wehmeyer believes finance is next, and he intends to lead this transformation. “Then, one day, we’ll be back on Wall Street. Not with the lobster, but with the bell.”
